Laukumate
What Laukumate is
Laukumate is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ceres, 29.7 km across, centred at 65.0° N, 159.4° E. It is the 91st largest named feature on Ceres and the 71st largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Latvian spirit, âMother of the fields.â The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016, under the theme it applies to every crater on Ceres. Of the 115 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (6), Sumerian (5), Egypt (5), Polynesia (3).
What it would take to settle Laukumate
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 65.0° N, 159.4° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — inside the polar zone where Ceres keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight — 42% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets.
Computed from Laukumate'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 crater features on Ceres
All 115 craters on Ceres — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.