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Ceres · Tholus · 55th largest named feature

Wangala Tholus

Garo people (Meghalaya and Assam states, NE India, and Bangladesh) post-harvest three-day festival that marks the end of the agricultural year (in November).

What Wangala Tholus is

Wangala Tholus is a tholus — a small domical mountain or hill — on Ceres, 50 km across, centred at 21.6° S, 6.6° E. It is the 55th largest named feature on Ceres and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Garo people (Meghalaya and Assam states, NE India, and Bangladesh) post-harvest three-day festival that marks the end of the agricultural year (in November). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every tholus on Ceres. Of the 12 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Peru (1), India (1), Colombia (1), United States (1).

Feature class
a small domical mountain or hill
Diameter
50 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
21.6° S, 6.6° E
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
India
Asia

What it would take to settle Wangala Tholus

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 21.6° S, 6.6° E.

Settlement difficulty here
43.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
0.5 easier than the median site
Ranked
59th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 93% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is ground mixed ground — a rim, a floor and slopes between them.

Computed from Wangala Tholus'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 tholus features on Ceres

All 12 tholi on Ceres — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.