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Ceres · Catena · 7th largest named feature

Junina Catenae

Brazilian festival with a rural theme held in June at end of rainy season to give thanks for fertile rain.

What Junina Catenae is

Junina Catenae is a catena — a chain of craters — on Ceres, 263 km across, centred at 26.0° N, 145.1° W. It is the 7th largest named feature on Ceres and the 3rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Brazilian festival with a rural theme held in June at end of rainy season to give thanks for fertile rain. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016, under the theme it applies to every catena on Ceres. Of the 6 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Gaelic (1), Nigeria (1), Brazil (1), Udmurtian (1).

Feature class
a chain of craters
Diameter
263 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
26.0° N, 145.1° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Brazil
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Junina Catenae

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 26.0° N, 145.1° W.

Settlement difficulty here
43.7/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
0.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
70th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 90% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is ground mixed ground — a rim, a floor and slopes between them.

Computed from Junina Catenae'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

The largest catena features on Ceres