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Ceres · Crater · 66th largest named feature

Messor

Roman god of harvesting, of cutting of the grain.

What Messor is

Messor is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ceres, 40 km across, centred at 49.9° N, 126.3° W. It is the 66th largest named feature on Ceres and the 49th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Roman god of harvesting, of cutting of the grain. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, 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).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
40 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
49.9° N, 126.3° 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 Messor

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 49.9° N, 126.3° W.

Settlement difficulty here
45.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
1.3 harder than the median site
Ranked
128th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is ground mixed ground — a rim, a floor and slopes between them. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Messor'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.