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Ceres · Catena · 29th largest named feature

Baltay Catena

Mordvinian (Volga River Region, Russia) agricultural festival.

What Baltay Catena is

Baltay Catena is a catena — a chain of craters — on Ceres, 83.5 km across, centred at 49.3° S, 85.5° W. It is the 29th largest named feature on Ceres and the 6th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Mordvinian (Volga River Region, Russia) agricultural festival. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016, under the theme it applies to every catena on Ceres. Of the 6 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Gaelic (1), Nigeria (1), Brazil (1), Udmurtian (1).

Feature class
a chain of craters
Diameter
83.5 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
49.3° S, 85.5° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Mordvinian
Europe

What it would take to settle Baltay Catena

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 49.3° S, 85.5° W.

Settlement difficulty here
45.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
1.9 harder than the median site
Ranked
137th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 65% 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 Baltay Catena'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 catena features on Ceres