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Mercury · Crater · 554th largest named feature

Rikyu

Sen no; Japanese tea master, designer of Japanese tea ceremony (1522-1591).

What Rikyu is

Rikyu is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 22.4 km across, centred at 79.9° N, 22.7° W in the Borealis quadrangle. It is the 554th largest named feature on Mercury and the 431st largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Sen no; Japanese tea master, designer of Japanese tea ceremony (1522-1591). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2013, 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
22.4 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
79.9° N, 22.7° W
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
2013
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Borealis
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Japan
Asia

What it would take to settle Rikyu

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 79.9° N, 22.7° W.

Settlement difficulty here
43.8/ 100
Better than most of this world
Mercury overall
46
2.2 easier than the median site
Ranked
43rd
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 29 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is sunlight 18% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets.

Computed from Rikyu'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.