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Venus · Tessera · 126th largest named feature

Jyestha Tesserae

Indian goddess of inauspicious things; sister of Lakshmi.

What Jyestha Tesserae is

Jyestha Tesserae is a tessera — terrain deformed into a tile-like pattern of ridges and grooves — on Venus, 1,252 km across, centred at 65.0° N, 16.6° W in the Lakshmi Planum quadrangle. It is the 126th largest named feature on Venus and the 19th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Indian goddess of inauspicious things; sister of Lakshmi. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every tessera on Venus. Of the 65 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Greek (10), Slavic (5), Roman (4), Egypt (4).

Feature class
terrain deformed into a tile-like pattern of ridges and grooves
Diameter
1,252 km
about the length of California
Coordinates
65.0° N, 16.6° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
2019
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Lakshmi Planum
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
India
Asia

What it would take to settle Jyestha Tesserae

Venus scores 43 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 65.0° N, 16.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
46.6/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Venus overall
43
3.6 harder than the median site
Ranked
1872nd
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is known ground 4,891 km from Venera 9 (1975). What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Jyestha Tesserae'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 Venus (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Venus 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 tessera features on Venus

All 65 tesserae on Venus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.