More on Io

[ffutures]

Working with Io again, and a VERY rough calculation which avoids trigonometry, I've got the surface area within 20 degrees of each pole as roughly 595,000 square kilometres, midway between Texas and California in size. I suppose it's just about possible to think of this as a small area compared to Io as a whole, especially if I say there's lots of geography to restrict the usable area some more. Does the size seem about right, or have I screwed up the maths?

Comments

[nelc.livejournal.com]

You should probably ignore me after my poor showing in the other thread, but using pauldrye's formula (confirmed on this page (http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Area_of_regions_on_the_lunar_sphere) (caution: trig)), I get 1.27 million sq. km for each cap.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh crap. Wonder where I went wrong. I just found a page with calculators that confirm it anyway.

Circular section calculator
http://www.1728.com/circsect.htm

Cap calculator
http://www.1728.com/sphere.htm

rats!