Sukkot Labes
What Sukkot Labes is
Sukkot Labes is a labes — a landslide — on Ceres, 11 km across, centred at 50.5° N, 26.8° E. It is the 130th largest named feature on Ceres and the 2nd largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Jewish autumn festival of double thanksgiving, celebrated for 8 days in September â October. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every labes on Ceres. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run The Netherlands (Dutch) (1), Jewish (1), India (1).
What it would take to settle Sukkot Labes
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 50.5° N, 26.8° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — on the shoulder of the ice-bearing latitudes. What works against it is ground — broken ground — hard to reach, and worth reaching for the shelter and the exposed strata.
Computed from Sukkot Labes'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.