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Ryugu · Saxum · 12th largest named feature

Ejima Saxum

Seacoast in Japanese fairy tale where fisherman Urashima Taro rescued a turtle and started his journey to the undersea Ryugu Palace.

What Ejima Saxum is

Ejima Saxum is a saxum — a boulder or rock — on Ryugu, 0.1 km across, centred at 32.0° S, 101.1° E. It is the 12th largest named feature on Ryugu and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Seacoast in Japanese fairy tale where fisherman Urashima Taro rescued a turtle and started his journey to the undersea Ryugu Palace. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2018, under the theme it applies to every saxum on Ryugu. Of the 3 features of this class catalogued on Ryugu, the naming categories run Japan (2), United States (1).

Feature class
a boulder or rock
Diameter
0.1 km
about 10.0 times shorter than a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
32.0° S, 101.1° E
Planetocentric, on Ryugu
Name approved
2018
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Ejima Saxum

Ryugu scores 58.1 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 32.0° S, 101.1° E.

Settlement difficulty here
58.8/ 100
Typical for this world
Ryugu overall
58.1
0.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
10th
of 13 named places on Ryugu

What this spot has going for it is known ground 1 km from Hayabusa2 touchdown (2019). What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Ejima Saxum'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 Ryugu (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Ryugu 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 saxum features on Ryugu