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The Moon · Astronaut-named features · 1985th largest named feature

Head

Astronaut-named feature, Apollo 12 site.

What Head is

Head is an astronaut-named features — small craters near the Apollo landing sites, named for the crews — on The Moon, 0.1 km across, centred at 3.0° S, 23.4° W in the Montes Riphaeus quadrangle. It is the 1985th largest named feature on The Moon and the 63rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Astronaut-named feature, Apollo 12 site. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1973, under the theme it applies to every astronaut-named features on The Moon. Of the 81 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run American (68), Great Britain (7), United States (3), France (1).

Feature class
small craters near the Apollo landing sites, named for the crews
Diameter
0.1 km
about 10.0 times shorter than a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
3.0° S, 23.4° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1973
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Montes Riphaeus
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
American
North America

What it would take to settle Head

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 3.0° S, 23.4° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26.2/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2.9 easier than the median site
Ranked
35th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 66° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Head'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 astronaut-named features features on The Moon

All 81 astronaut-named features on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.