लाइव
Mercury · Crater · 313th largest named feature

Sarmiento

Domingo Faustino; Argentine writer (1811-1888).

What Sarmiento is

Sarmiento is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 95 km across, centred at 29.3° S, 170.4° E in the Solitudo Perseph quadrangle. It is the 313th largest named feature on Mercury and the 216th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Domingo Faustino; Argentine writer (1811-1888). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1979, 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
95 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
29.3° S, 170.4° E
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
1979
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Solitudo Perseph
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Argentina
South and Central America

What it would take to settle Sarmiento

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 29.3° S, 170.4° E.

Settlement difficulty here
46/ 100
Typical for this world
Mercury overall
46
Exactly typical
Ranked
309th
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is sunlight 87% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Sarmiento'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.