OrbitStudio Open the generator →

OrbitStudio / Ceres landmarks / Ahuna Mons

Ahuna Mons

A lone mountain on Ceres, standing on its own on a plain in the southern hemisphere. Scientists think it is a volcano of salty mud and ice, and at the smallest region Ceres allows it prints as one tall dome.

SizeAbout 20 km across
HeightAbout 4 km on average, about 5 km on its steepest side
Coordinates10.48° S, 43.8° W
TypeMountain (mons), thought to be a cryovolcanic dome
Named afterAhuna, the post-harvest festival of the Sumi people of Nagaland, India; adopted by the IAU in 2015
Elevation sourceDawn shape model (JPL), 100 m grid

Size, coordinates and name from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature; the height and what it is made of from NASA and Ruesch et al. 2016 in Science. Coordinates are the center point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Where is Ahuna Mons on Ceres?

Ahuna Mons is centered at 10.48° south, 43.8° west, alone on a plain in Ceres's southern hemisphere; the gazetteer gives its longitude as 316.20° east. The International Astronomical Union named it in 2015 after Ahuna, the festival the Sumi people of Nagaland, in north-east India, hold after the harvest: Ceres's mountains are named after harvest festivals.

What is Ahuna Mons made of?

Most likely salt and ice. NASA says the mountain most closely resembles a volcanic dome and probably formed as a salty-mud volcano: a mix of salts and water ice that pushed up from inside Ceres and piled up on the surface. Ruesch et al. found that it was active within the past 210 million years or so, recent in geological terms. It stands about 4 kilometers high on average, about 5 on its steepest side, and about 20 kilometers across, with no other mountain like it nearby.

What does Ahuna Mons look like as a 3D print?

One tall dome. Its entry frames about 33 kilometers, the smallest region Ceres allows, so the mountain fills most of the view, and on a model 200 millimeters across the relief from the lowest point in the view to the summit comes out at about 47 millimeters at true scale. That is the steepest landmark on Ceres; a puzzle cover sits high on a region this steep, and the generator says so. This is the region OrbitStudio printed as its first Ceres test, a hexagon puzzle 200 millimeters across at true scale. Streaks down the flanks are in the data: where the slopes are bright or dark, the model reads some of that as slope.

Print Ahuna Mons in OrbitStudio Watch how it works · 1:12

What is OrbitStudio?

OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Ceres on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the shape model NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory made from Dawn's images, on a 100-meter grid.

Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — takes a Plus or Merchant plan, or one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus, Pluto and Charon too.

Other landmarks

Occator Haulani Kerwan All Ceres landmarks

The night sky, too

OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.