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Mars · Albedo Feature

Tharsis

Connecting link between East and West; ancient Spanish town Tartessus.

What Tharsis is

Tharsis is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Mars, centred at 0.0° N, 100.0° W.

Where the name comes from

Connecting link between East and West; ancient Spanish town Tartessus. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1973.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
Not catalogued
Coordinates
0.0° N, 100.0° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
1973
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Tharsis

Mars scores 26.6 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 0.0° N, 100.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
25.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
0.9 easier than the median site
Ranked
293rd
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 100% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Tharsis'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 Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 albedo feature features on Mars