Nar Sulcus
What Nar Sulcus is
Nar Sulcus is a sulcus — a set of parallel grooves and ridges — on Ceres, 63 km across, centred at 41.9° S, 79.9° W. It is the 45th largest named feature on Ceres and the 1st largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Azerbaijani festival of pomegranate harvest. Held in October â November in Goychay city, center of pomegranates cultivation in Azerbaijan. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016.
What it would take to settle Nar Sulcus
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 41.9° S, 79.9° W.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 75% 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 Nar Sulcus'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.