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The Moon · Crater · 1519th largest named feature

McCool

William Cameron; American astronaut, Space Shuttle Columbia Pilot (1961-2003).

What McCool is

McCool is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 20.5 km across, centred at 41.3° S, 146.3° W in the Apollo quadrangle. It is the 1519th largest named feature on The Moon and the 1238th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

William Cameron; American astronaut, Space Shuttle Columbia Pilot (1961-2003). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every crater on The Moon. Of the 1615 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (234), American (229), France (163), Great Britain (160).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
20.5 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
41.3° S, 146.3° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Apollo
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
United States
North America

What it would take to settle McCool

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 41.3° S, 146.3° W.

Settlement difficulty here
31.8/ 100
Harder than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2.7 harder than the median site
Ranked
1810th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is temperature about -23 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from McCool'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 crater features on The Moon

All 1,615 craters on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.