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Ceres · Crater · 133rd largest named feature

Tawals

Polish god of the fields, of the tilling.

What Tawals is

Tawals is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ceres, 8.8 km across, centred at 39.1° S, 122.0° W. It is the 133rd largest named feature on Ceres and the 105th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Polish god of the fields, of the tilling. 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).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
8.8 km
about 1.8 times a 5 km run
Coordinates
39.1° S, 122.0° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Poland
Europe

What it would take to settle Tawals

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 39.1° S, 122.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
44/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
0.2 harder than the median site
Ranked
84th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 78% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Tawals'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.