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Mercury · Crater · 506th largest named feature

Namatjira

Albert; Australian Aboriginal artist, pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art (1902-1959).

What Namatjira is

Namatjira is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 34 km across, centred at 58.8° N, 33.0° W in the Victoria quadrangle. It is the 506th largest named feature on Mercury and the 388th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Albert; Australian Aboriginal artist, pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art (1902-1959). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, under the theme it applies to every crater on Mercury. Of the 449 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run France (36), United States (35), Japan (33), Italy (31).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
34 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
58.8° N, 33.0° W
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Victoria
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Australia
Oceania

What it would take to settle Namatjira

Mercury scores 46 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 58.8° N, 33.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
47.4/ 100
Typical for this world
Mercury overall
46
1.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
502nd
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 123 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Namatjira'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 Mercury (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mercury 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 Mercury

All 449 craters on Mercury — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.