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Ceres · Crater · 108th largest named feature

Dikhan

Dikhan baba; Kazakh preislamic deity of farming.

What Dikhan is

Dikhan is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ceres, 21 km across, centred at 81.8° N, 78.1° E. It is the 108th largest named feature on Ceres and the 86th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Dikhan baba; Kazakh preislamic deity of farming. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2017, under the theme it applies to every crater on Ceres. Of the 115 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (6), Sumerian (5), Egypt (5), Polynesia (3).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
21 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
81.8° N, 78.1° E
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2017
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Kazakhstan
Asia

What it would take to settle Dikhan

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 81.8° N, 78.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
47.3/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Ceres overall
43.8
3.5 harder than the median site
Ranked
143rd
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where Ceres keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight 15% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets.

Computed from Dikhan'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 crater features on Ceres

All 115 craters on Ceres — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.