Planum Australe
What Planum Australe is
Planum Australe is a planum — a high plain or plateau — on Mars, 1,430 km across, centred at 83.3° S, 157.7° E in the Mare Australe quadrangle. It is the 51st largest named feature on Mars and the 6th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Classical albedo feature. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, under the theme it applies to every planum on Mars. Of the 35 features of this class catalogued on Mars, the naming categories run Greek (17), Latin (14), Egypt (2), Italy (1).
What it would take to settle Planum Australe
Mars scores 26.6 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 83.3° S, 157.7° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — inside the polar zone where Mars keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight — 45% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets.
Computed from Planum Australe's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 planum features on Mars
All 35 plana on Mars — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.