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The Moon · Crater · 920th largest named feature

Dryden

Hugh Latimer; American physicist, engineer (1898-1965).

What Dryden is

Dryden is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 54.5 km across, centred at 33.2° S, 156.2° W in the Apollo quadrangle. It is the 920th largest named feature on The Moon and the 694th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Hugh Latimer; American physicist, engineer (1898-1965). 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
54.5 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
33.2° S, 156.2° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1970
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Apollo
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
American
North America

What it would take to settle Dryden

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 33.2° S, 156.2° W.

Settlement difficulty here
31.2/ 100
Harder than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
1652nd
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is temperature about -16 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Dryden'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.

Dryden's satellite craters

The IAU names smaller craters around a major one by letter. Dryden has 3, and each shares the parent's namesake rather than carrying one of its own.

Dryden S 34.5 kmDryden T 34.8 kmDryden W 19.1 km

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.