Live
Ceres · Crater · 19th largest named feature

Kirnis

Lithuanian spirit, guardian of cherry trees.

What Kirnis is

Kirnis is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Ceres, 115 km across, centred at 4.9° N, 95.7° W. It is the 19th largest named feature on Ceres and the 12th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Lithuanian spirit, guardian of cherry trees. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every crater on Ceres. Of the 115 features of this class catalogued on Ceres, the naming categories run Roman (6), Sumerian (5), Egypt (5), Polynesia (3).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
115 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
4.9° N, 95.7° W
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Lithuania
Europe

What it would take to settle Kirnis

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 4.9° N, 95.7° W.

Settlement difficulty here
42.3/ 100
Typical for this world
Ceres overall
43.8
1.5 easier than the median site
Ranked
14th
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 100% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Kirnis'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 crater features on Ceres

All 115 craters on Ceres — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.