Plancia
What Plancia is
Plancia is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Vesta, 18.5 km across, centred at 61.6° N, 16.1° W. It is the 64th largest named feature on Vesta and the 48th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Plancia Magna; daughter of Roman Senator Varus, wife of Tertullus, benefactress and patron of Perga, the capital of the Roman province of Pamphylia in Asia Minor (1st-2nd century A.D.). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2014, under the theme it applies to every crater on Vesta.
What it would take to settle Plancia
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 61.6° N, 16.1° W.
What this spot has going for it is temperature — about -99 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water — same as everywhere else on this world.
Computed from Plancia'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 crater features on Vesta
All 90 craters on Vesta — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.