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Ceres · Planum · 3rd largest named feature

Hanami Planum

Japanese cherry blossom festival.

What Hanami Planum is

Hanami Planum is a planum — a high plain or plateau — on Ceres, 555 km across, centred at 15.0° N, 130.0° W. It is the 3rd largest named feature on Ceres and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Japanese cherry blossom festival. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016.

Feature class
a high plain or plateau
Diameter
555 km
about 1.6 times the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
15.0° N, 130.0° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Hanami Planum

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 15.0° N, 130.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
40.9/ 100
Better than most of this world
Ceres overall
43.8
2.9 easier than the median site
Ranked
1st
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 97% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Hanami Planum'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.

What is next to it