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The Moon · Crater · 208th largest named feature

Antoniadi

Eugène Michael; Turkish-born French astronomer (1870-1944).

What Antoniadi is

Antoniadi is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 138 km across, centred at 69.3° S, 173.1° W in the Minnaert quadrangle. It is the 208th largest named feature on The Moon and the 82nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Eugène Michael; Turkish-born French astronomer (1870-1944). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1970, under the theme it applies to every crater on The Moon. Of the 1615 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (234), American (229), France (163), Great Britain (160).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
138 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
69.3° S, 173.1° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1970
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Minnaert
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
France
Europe

What it would take to settle Antoniadi

The Moon scores 29.1 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 69.3° S, 173.1° W.

Settlement difficulty here
34.8/ 100
Harder than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
5.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
2021st
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is known ground 728 km from LCROSS Probe (2009). What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Antoniadi's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 84% of the model's weight had a basis here, and one axis was dropped as not applicable to The Moon (radiation geometry). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on The Moon 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 The Moon

All 1,615 craters on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.