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Ceres · Facula · 116th largest named feature

Vinalia Faculae

Roman wine festivals, celebrated twice a year: on April 23 when the new wine was tasted and August 19 when the new wine was opened for all.

What Vinalia Faculae is

Vinalia Faculae is a facula — a bright spot — on Ceres, 19 km across, centred at 20.2° N, 118.0° W. It is the 116th largest named feature on Ceres and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Roman wine festivals, celebrated twice a year: on April 23 when the new wine was tasted and August 19 when the new wine was opened for all. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016, under the theme it applies to every facula on Ceres. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (2), Indonesia (1).

Feature class
a bright spot
Diameter
19 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
20.2° N, 118.0° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Vinalia Faculae

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 20.2° N, 118.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
42.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
1.7 easier than the median site
Ranked
6th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 94% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Vinalia Faculae'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 facula features on Ceres