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Vesta · Tholus · 29th largest named feature

Aricia Tholus

City at the foot of Albanus Mons, once a powerful city in early Latium (present-day Ariccia).

What Aricia Tholus is

Aricia Tholus is a tholus — a small domical mountain or hill — on Vesta, 39 km across, centred at 13.4° N, 48.5° W. It is the 29th largest named feature on Vesta and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

City at the foot of Albanus Mons, once a powerful city in early Latium (present-day Ariccia). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2011, under the theme it applies to every tholus on Vesta.

Feature class
a small domical mountain or hill
Diameter
39 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
13.4° N, 48.5° 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 Aricia Tholus

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 13.4° N, 48.5° W.

Settlement difficulty here
55.9/ 100
Typical for this world
Vesta overall
56.2
0.3 easier than the median site
Ranked
40th
of 106 named places on Vesta

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 98% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Vesta gets. What works against it is water same as everywhere else on this world.

Computed from Aricia Tholus'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 tholus features on Vesta