Xu Xiake
What Xu Xiake is
Xu Xiake is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 10 km across, centred at 40.9° S, 153.8° W in the Apollo quadrangle. It is the 1723rd largest named feature on The Moon and the 1413th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Chinese geographer, traveler during the Ming Dynasty (1586-1641). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2024, 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).
What it would take to settle Xu Xiake
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 40.9° S, 153.8° W.
What this spot has going for it is temperature — about -22 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Xu Xiake'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.