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Mars · Planum · 178th largest named feature

Aonia Planum

Classical albedo feature name.

What Aonia Planum is

Aonia Planum is a planum — a high plain or plateau — on Mars, 564 km across, centred at 57.9° S, 78.7° W in the Thaumasia quadrangle. It is the 178th largest named feature on Mars and the 29th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Classical albedo feature name. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2003, under the theme it applies to every planum on Mars. Of the 35 features of this class catalogued on Mars, the naming categories run Greek (17), Latin (14), Egypt (2), Italy (1).

Feature class
a high plain or plateau
Diameter
564 km
about 1.6 times the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
57.9° S, 78.7° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
2003
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Thaumasia
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Aonia Planum

Mars scores 26.6 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 57.9° S, 78.7° W.

Settlement difficulty here
24/ 100
Better than most of this world
Mars overall
26.6
2.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
5th
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where Mars keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight 60% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets.

Computed from Aonia Planum's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 planum features on Mars

All 35 plana on Mars — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.