Ceres
The most water-rich body in the inner Solar System after Earth, and it sits at the top of a very shallow gravity well.
Surface conditions on Ceres
Every figure below is tagged with where it came from. Measured means an instrument read it on or at the body; modeled means it was computed and never directly observed.
What it would take to settle Ceres
No world off Earth is habitable — the honest habitable fraction of every surface here is zero. What can be answered is how far each one sits from Earth along the seven axes a habitat has to buy its way out of. Ceres scores 43.8 out of 100, on 100% coverage of the axes. The single worst axis here is pressure (1e-12 bar (vacuum)); the one that most sets Ceres apart from the other thirteen is gravity.
Below the Armstrong limit (0.062 bar) body fluids boil at body temperature — the difference between needing a mask and needing a pressure vessel. Above 1 bar the problem inverts into containment, and Venus at 92 bar has never let a lander live two hours.
Delta-v sets what a launch costs; cruise time sets how much consumable, shielding and crew patience each kilogram of payload drags with it.
Both directions cost power continuously. A cold world burns reactor output to stay warm; a hot one has no cold sink to dump heat into at all.
Shielding is mass, and mass is the single most expensive thing to move. Above roughly 1 mSv/day a surface habitat has to be buried.
Who has been to Ceres
Orbited by Dawn until 2018. The spacecraft is still there, in a stable quarantine orbit.
Unprotected survival: Seconds.
Exposed surface ice in shadowed craters, a subsurface brine reservoir feeding the Occator bright spots, and enough water overall to rival all of Earth's fresh water.
The named places on Ceres
The IAU has approved 149 names on Ceres, each drawn from a theme the naming committee chose for this world. Every name in the scene above is one of them, placed at its catalogued coordinates.
Sources
- Dawn Framing Camera — Dawn colour shaded relief, ~140 m/px (NASA Trek / USGS Astrogeology)
- IAU / USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature
- NASA Dawn at Ceres
Imagery is public-domain NASA/USGS mission data, streamed live from NASA Trek as a plate-carrée tile pyramid and draped on our own sphere — no third-party globe library and no cached copy of anyone else's map.