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Ceres · Facula · 125th largest named feature

Cerealia Facula

The major festival in Ancient Rome to celebrate for the grain goddess Ceres (8 days in mid- to late April).

What Cerealia Facula is

Cerealia Facula is a facula — a bright spot — on Ceres, 14 km across, centred at 19.7° N, 120.4° W. It is the 125th largest named feature on Ceres and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

The major festival in Ancient Rome to celebrate for the grain goddess Ceres (8 days in mid- to late April). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016, under the theme it applies to every facula on Ceres. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (2), Indonesia (1).

Feature class
a bright spot
Diameter
14 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
19.7° N, 120.4° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Cerealia Facula

Ceres scores 43.8 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 19.7° N, 120.4° W.

Settlement difficulty here
42.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
1.7 easier than the median site
Ranked
5th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 94% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Cerealia Facula's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Ceres (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ceres 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 facula features on Ceres