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Mars · Macula · 540th largest named feature

Olympus Maculae

Classical albedo feature name.

What Olympus Maculae is

Olympus Maculae is a macula — a dark spot — on Mars, 124 km across, centred at 17.4° N, 142.8° W in the Amazonis quadrangle. It is the 540th largest named feature on Mars and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Classical albedo feature name. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2017.

Feature class
a dark spot
Diameter
124 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
17.4° N, 142.8° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
2017
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Amazonis
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Olympus Maculae

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 17.4° N, 142.8° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
0.5 easier than the median site
Ranked
623rd
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 96% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Olympus Maculae'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