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Vesta · Fossa · 4th largest named feature

Saturnalia Fossae

Three-day Roman festival starting on December 17, with sacrifices, public feasting, gifts, and slaves were waited on by their masters.

What Saturnalia Fossae is

Saturnalia Fossae is a fossa — a long, narrow depression — on Vesta, 345 km across, centred at 28.1° N, 37.1° E. It is the 4th largest named feature on Vesta and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Three-day Roman festival starting on December 17, with sacrifices, public feasting, gifts, and slaves were waited on by their masters. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2011, under the theme it applies to every fossa on Vesta.

Feature class
a long, narrow depression
Diameter
345 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
28.1° N, 37.1° E
Planetocentric, on Vesta
Name approved
2011
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Saturnalia Fossae

Vesta scores 56.2 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 28.1° N, 37.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
56.9/ 100
Typical for this world
Vesta overall
56.2
0.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
73rd
of 106 named places on Vesta

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 90% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Vesta gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Saturnalia Fossae'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 Vesta (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Vesta 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 fossa features on Vesta