Pasola Facula
What Pasola Facula is
Pasola Facula is a facula — a bright spot — on Ceres, 2.9 km across, centred at 19.5° N, 120.8° W. It is the 148th largest named feature on Ceres and the 3rd largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Festival of rice planting season at Sumba Island (Lesser Sunda Islands, E. Indonesia). (February â March). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every facula on Ceres. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (2), Indonesia (1).
What it would take to settle Pasola Facula
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 19.5° N, 120.8° W.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 94% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Pasola Facula'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.