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Ceres · Mons · 27th largest named feature

Liberalia Mons

Ancient Roman festival to honor Liber and Libera, deities of the vine, worshiped, along with Ceres as fertility gods, held on March 17.

What Liberalia Mons is

Liberalia Mons is a mons — a mountain — on Ceres, 90 km across, centred at 6.0° N, 49.0° W. It is the 27th largest named feature on Ceres and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Ancient Roman festival to honor Liber and Libera, deities of the vine, worshiped, along with Ceres as fertility gods, held on March 17. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every mons on Ceres. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (1), India (1), Ecuador (1).

Feature class
a mountain
Diameter
90 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
6.0° N, 49.0° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Liberalia Mons

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 6.0° N, 49.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
43.8/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
Exactly typical
Ranked
73rd
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 99% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is ground broken ground — hard to reach, and worth reaching for the shelter and the exposed strata.

Computed from Liberalia Mons'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 mons features on Ceres