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The Moon · Crater · 883rd largest named feature

Marinus

Of Tyre; Greek geographer (unkn-c. 100).

What Marinus is

Marinus is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 56.6 km across, centred at 39.4° S, 76.6° E in the Furnerius quadrangle. It is the 883rd largest named feature on The Moon and the 659th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Of Tyre; Greek geographer (unkn-c. 100). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1935, 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
56.6 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
39.4° S, 76.6° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1935
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Furnerius
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Marinus

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 39.4° S, 76.6° E.

Settlement difficulty here
29.2/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
0.1 harder than the median site
Ranked
1029th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link on the limb, where libration lifts Earth barely above the horizon. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Marinus'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.

Marinus's satellite craters

The IAU names smaller craters around a major one by letter. Marinus has 11, and each shares the parent's namesake rather than carrying one of its own.

Marinus A 25.2 kmMarinus B 58.2 kmMarinus C 37.4 kmMarinus E 17.5 kmMarinus F 19 kmMarinus G 23.4 kmMarinus H 17.1 kmMarinus J 9.1 kmMarinus M 28.4 kmMarinus N 17.9 kmMarinus R 44.1 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.