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Venus · Rupes · 254th largest named feature

Vesta Rupes

Roman hearth goddess.

What Vesta Rupes is

Vesta Rupes is a rupes — a scarp or cliff — on Venus, 788 km across, centred at 58.3° N, 36.1° W in the Lakshmi Planum quadrangle. It is the 254th largest named feature on Venus and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Roman hearth goddess. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1982, under the theme it applies to every rupes on Venus. Of the 7 features of this class catalogued on Venus, the naming categories run Lithuania (2), Roman (2), Caucasus (1), Turkmenistan (1).

Feature class
a scarp or cliff
Diameter
788 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
58.3° N, 36.1° W
Planetocentric, on Venus
Name approved
1982
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Lakshmi Planum
Map sheet on Venus
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Vesta Rupes

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 58.3° N, 36.1° W.

Settlement difficulty here
46/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Venus overall
43
3 harder than the median site
Ranked
1807th
of 1,985 named places on Venus

What this spot has going for it is known ground 3,697 km from Venera 9 (1975). What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Vesta Rupes'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 rupes features on Venus