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Mercury · Albedo Feature

Hesperis

Albedo feature; Antoniadi map.

What Hesperis is

Hesperis is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Mercury, centred at 45.0° S, 5.0° E in the Cyllene quadrangle.

Where the name comes from

Albedo feature; Antoniadi map. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
Not catalogued
Coordinates
45.0° S, 5.0° E
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Cyllene
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Hesperis

Mercury scores 46 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 45.0° S, 5.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
46/ 100
Typical for this world
Mercury overall
46
Exactly typical
Ranked
287th
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is ground flat ground — the easiest thing to land on and build across. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Hesperis'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 Mercury (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mercury 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