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Mercury · Crater · 103rd largest named feature

Bach

J. S.; German composer (1685-1750).

What Bach is

Bach is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 214 km across, centred at 69.9° S, 103.0° W in the Bach quadrangle. It is the 103rd largest named feature on Mercury and the 30th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

J. S.; German composer (1685-1750). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, 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
214 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
69.9° S, 103.0° W
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Bach
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Germany
Europe

What it would take to settle Bach

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 69.9° S, 103.0° W.

Settlement difficulty here
47.9/ 100
Typical for this world
Mercury overall
46
1.9 harder than the median site
Ranked
551st
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 85 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Bach'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.