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Ceres · Planitia · 1st largest named feature

Vendimia Planitia

Grape harvest festival in Mendoza (Argentina) during the first week of March. It is one of the most important festivals in the country.

What Vendimia Planitia is

Vendimia Planitia is a planitia — a low plain — on Ceres, 750 km across, centred at 23.0° N, 135.0° E. It is the 1st largest named feature on Ceres and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Grape harvest festival in Mendoza (Argentina) during the first week of March. It is one of the most important festivals in the country. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2016.

Feature class
a low plain
Diameter
750 km
about the length of Italy
Coordinates
23.0° N, 135.0° E
Planetocentric, on Ceres
Name approved
2016
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Argentina
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Vendimia Planitia

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 23.0° N, 135.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
41.1/ 100
Better than most of this world
Ceres overall
43.8
2.7 easier than the median site
Ranked
2nd
of 149 named places on Ceres

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 92% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Ceres gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Vendimia Planitia'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