#pydar

Hot off the presses from the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (5/23/2024)

The IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature has approved the names Chapala Lacus , Robino Lacus, Fena Lacus, Dem Lacus, Tibi Lacus, and Vaca Lacus for six features on Titan. For more information, please see the Titan North Pole nomenclature map in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature

All six new named features are lakes (lacus) and are all named after lakes on Earth

Chapala Lacus: Named after a lake in Mexico

Dem Lacus: Named after a Lake in Burkina Faso

Fena Lacus: Named after a lake in Guam

Robino Lacus: Named after a lake in Haiti

Tibi Lacus: Named after a lake in the Sierra Leone

Vaca Lacus: Named after a Lake in Belize

All six lakes are visible from Cassini between 72-78 degrees latitude and 129-144 degrees longitude on Titan. The lakes are the small dark smudges:

The images above were recovered from the Cassini RADAR images taken of the spot on September 30, 2005 (T18-S01). This was done via pydar—a Python tool I help develop

Side note: it took longer than expected to get these changes up in Pydar because the web scrapper in place kept failing mysteriously. I think the folks that run the planetary data service for Cassini should sent me—me specifically—an email to tell me they were updating the website URL from “pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov” to “planetarydata.jpl.nasa.gov” since it broke the backend for Pydar in a very strange way and I couldn’t find any reference to the change. All fixed now but it was confusing to debug