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Venus · Tholus · 617th largest named feature

Toci Tholus

Aztec earthquake goddess.

What Toci Tholus is

Toci Tholus is a tholus — a small domical mountain or hill — on Venus, 300 km across, centred at 29.5° N, 4.9° W in the Sedna Planitia quadrangle. It is the 617th largest named feature on Venus and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Aztec earthquake goddess. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1997, under the theme it applies to every tholus on Venus. Of the 62 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Greek (5), Slavic (4), New Zealand (3), Japan (3).

Feature class
a small domical mountain or hill
Diameter
300 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
29.5° N, 4.9° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
1997
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Sedna Planitia
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
Aztec
North America

What it would take to settle Toci Tholus

Venus scores 43 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 29.5° N, 4.9° W.

Settlement difficulty here
43/ 100
Typical for this world
Venus overall
43
Exactly typical
Ranked
976th
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 87% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Venus gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Toci Tholus's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Venus (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Venus and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.

What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.

What is next to it

The largest tholus features on Venus

All 62 tholi on Venus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.