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Mercury · Vallis · 413th largest named feature

Caral Vallis

Ancient city in the Supe Valley, Peru.

What Caral Vallis is

Caral Vallis is a vallis — a valley — on Mercury, 64 km across, centred at 62.7° N, 129.3° E in the Liguria quadrangle. It is the 413th largest named feature on Mercury and the 5th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Ancient city in the Supe Valley, Peru. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2013, under the theme it applies to every vallis on Mercury. Of the 5 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run Algeria (1), Italy (1), Cambodia (1), United States (1).

Feature class
a valley
Diameter
64 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
62.7° N, 129.3° E
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
2013
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Liguria
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Peru
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Caral Vallis

Mercury scores 46 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 62.7° N, 129.3° E.

Settlement difficulty here
48.7/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Mercury overall
46
2.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
588th
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 112 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Caral Vallis's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mercury (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mercury 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 vallis features on Mercury