Deia

Deia from just beyond its hill sphere

Deia is the second and smallest major moon orbiting Glau, between the orbits of Eoros and Marthys. This tiny world is unique in that it is one of the few moons known to the Verdan Federation to have a stable ring system. Despite its tiny hill sphere, the ring system is stabilized in part by resonances with Glau itself, enabling to exist near the influence of this monstrous planet.

## Physical Characteristics

Smallest of the Glau system's major moons, Deia is primarily composed of ice with relatively low tensile strength, enabling it to self-gravitate into a sphere despite its tiny size. Deia is geologically dead despite its proximity to its monstrous parent, the only evidence of tidal activity being thin pockets of sterile liquid water deep beneath the surface. At its core, there lies a highly dense mass, likely composed of undifferentiated silicates and metals.

Deia's surface is pockmarked with craters, ranging from billions of years old to less than ten. The younger craters tend to be surrounded by bright ejecta rays as the impact blasted untouched, buried ice out onto the moon's surface. In the past, due to greater eccentricity in Deia's orbit, the moon was under immense tidal stress, causing ancient rift canyons to form. These persist, although the tidal forces have long since vanished. An anomalous, subtle darkening on the leading hemisphere is likely caused by impact with dust from Glau's ring plane.

## Orbital Characteristics & Rotation

Deia's orbit is almost perfectly circular, allowing tidal forces to be much diminished and the moon's famous rings to be stabilized. Its extremely low inclination also puts it almost perfectly in line with Glau's ring plane, causing minute amounts of dust to impact its surface over time, slowly darkening the ice on the leading hemisphere. The moon is tidally locked, as are essentially all large moons.

## Rings

Deia possesses a tenuous ring system consisting of three narrow, relatively dense bands within a very sparse particulate disk. As the first discovery of a stable ring system around a moon, these rings are the moon's most notable feature by far.

Although barely visible against the blackness of space, when Deia passes in front of another object, they are made clear to the eye. The rings cause magnetospheric depletion of energetic electrons in the region of the moon, which made their initial detection possible by the *Epicco Trek*

## Civilization

Deia's small size restricts its population significantly, with the planetary surface only hosting 843 million individuals in various arcologies scattered through the moon. The moon's tiny hill sphere also generally prevents much in the way of habitat stations in the moon's orbit, although there have been many assembled at its lagrange points. Due to Deia's geological inactivity, there have been many cold-running systems assembled deep beneath its surface, such as computers which can complete enormous amounts of calculations on low power due to the cold temperatures shielded form the sun.

The moon's capital city, Sallas, exists beneath a transparent aluminum dome just beyond the southern polar region. Like most artificial habitats, Sallas is entirely self-sufficient, with farming and various manufacturing all being done on-site. Sallas spaceport is also one of two points on Deia's surface linked to the station orbiting at its L1 point and thus to the rest of civilization by a space elevator.