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The Moon · Sinus · 271st largest named feature

Sinus Lunicus

"Lunik Bay"-landing area of Luna (Lunik) 2.

What Sinus Lunicus is

Sinus Lunicus is a sinus — a bay-shaped dark plain — on The Moon, 119 km across, centred at 32.4° N, 1.9° W in the Cassini quadrangle. It is the 271st largest named feature on The Moon and the 9th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

"Lunik Bay"-landing area of Luna (Lunik) 2. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1970, under the theme it applies to every sinus on The Moon.

Feature class
a bay-shaped dark plain
Diameter
119 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
32.4° N, 1.9° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1970
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Cassini
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Sinus Lunicus

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 32.4° N, 1.9° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26.7/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2.4 easier than the median site
Ranked
106th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 58° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Sinus Lunicus'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 sinus features on The Moon

All 12 sinus on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.