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Mars · Albedo Feature

Mare Chronium

"Cronian Sea", northern part of World Sea where eternal dead calm, dangerous to ships, prevailed.

What Mare Chronium is

Mare Chronium is an albedo feature — a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance — on Mars, centred at 57.7° S, 150.0° E in the Eridania quadrangle.

Where the name comes from

"Cronian Sea", northern part of World Sea where eternal dead calm, dangerous to ships, prevailed. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1958.

Feature class
a region named for how bright or dark it appears from a distance
Diameter
Not catalogued
Coordinates
57.7° S, 150.0° E
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
1958
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Eridania
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Mare Chronium

Mars scores 26.6 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 57.7° S, 150.0° E.

Settlement difficulty here
24.5/ 100
Better than most of this world
Mars overall
26.6
2.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
20th
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where Mars keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight 61% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets.

Computed from Mare Chronium's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 albedo feature features on Mars