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Mercury · Crater · 245th largest named feature

Unkei

Japanese sculptor (c. 1148-1223).

What Unkei is

Unkei is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 121 km across, centred at 31.8° S, 62.6° W in the Discovery quadrangle. It is the 245th largest named feature on Mercury and the 154th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Japanese sculptor (c. 1148-1223). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, 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
121 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
31.8° S, 62.6° W
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Discovery
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Unkei

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 31.8° S, 62.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
46.1/ 100
Typical for this world
Mercury overall
46
0.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
319th
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 85% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Unkei'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.