All 106 named places on Vesta, scored one coordinate at a time on sunlight, water, radiation, temperature, ground and access — then ranked. Feralia Planitia comes out first.
Vesta as a whole rates 56.2/100 to settle, and that single number is the same for every square metre of it. It is also the wrong number for a mission, because sunlight, water, radiation dose and the ground itself all change with where you stand. The ranking below re-asks the question at each of 106 catalogued coordinates and reports the difference from the median site — so a score of 56.2 here means “typical for Vesta”, not “good”.
Water on Vesta: Dawn found hydrogen-rich, hydrated material in the darker low-latitude terrain, but no ice.
Elevation. Every score above comes from a latitude, a longitude and a feature class — never from a terrain model — so slope, local shadowing and the polar peaks of eternal light are invisible to it. That last one matters: on a world tilted barely a degree, a ridge top near the pole can catch sunlight almost continuously while a crater floor a few kilometres away has not seen the Sun in two billion years. This model scores the average surface at a latitude, so it reads poles as dark and ranks them accordingly. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually the reason — and the reason to read this as one input, not a verdict.
