The most water-rich body in the inner Solar System after Earth, and it sits at the top of a very shallow gravity well.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
