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Vesta · Fossa · 1st largest named feature

Divalia Fossae

Roman festival held on December 21 in honor of the goddess Angerona.

What Divalia Fossae is

Divalia Fossae is a fossa — a long, narrow depression — on Vesta, 549 km across, centred at 9.1° S, 163.8° W. It is the 1st largest named feature on Vesta and the 1st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Roman festival held on December 21 in honor of the goddess Angerona. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2011, under the theme it applies to every fossa on Vesta.

Feature class
a long, narrow depression
Diameter
549 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
9.1° S, 163.8° W
Planetocentric, on Vesta
Name approved
2011
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Naming category
Roman
Europe

What it would take to settle Divalia Fossae

Vesta scores 56.2 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 9.1° S, 163.8° W.

Settlement difficulty here
56.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Vesta overall
56.2
0.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
50th
of 106 named places on Vesta

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 99% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Vesta gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Divalia Fossae'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 Vesta (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Vesta 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 fossa features on Vesta