Li Ch ing Chao
What Li Ch ing Chao is
Li Ch ing Chao is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 69 km across, centred at 78.0° S, 71.2° W in the Bach quadrangle. It is the 392nd largest named feature on Mercury and the 289th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Chinese poet (1081-c. 1141). 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).
What it would take to settle Li Ch ing Chao
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 78.0° S, 71.2° W.
What this spot has going for it is temperature — about 43 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is sunlight — 21% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets.
Computed from Li Ch ing Chao'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.