Borobudur Fossae
What Borobudur Fossae is
Borobudur Fossae is a fossa — a long, narrow depression — on Mercury, 395 km across, centred at 32.8° S, 88.5° E in the Cyllene quadrangle. It is the 43rd largest named feature on Mercury and the 1st largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
A 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in Magelang Regency, in Central Java, Indonesia, consisting of nine stacked platforms and topped by a central dome. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2019, under the theme it applies to every fossa on Mercury. Of the 2 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run Indonesia (1), Roman (1).
What it would take to settle Borobudur Fossae
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 32.8° S, 88.5° E.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 84% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Borobudur Fossae'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.