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The Moon · Crater · 157th largest named feature

Richardson

Sir Owen Willans; British quantum physicist; Nobel laureate (1879-1959).

What Richardson is

Richardson is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 163 km across, centred at 30.9° N, 99.9° E in the Joliot quadrangle. It is the 157th largest named feature on The Moon and the 53rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Sir Owen Willans; British quantum physicist; Nobel laureate (1879-1959). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1979, 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
163 km
about 1.6 times the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
30.9° N, 99.9° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1979
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Joliot
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Great Britain
Europe

What it would take to settle Richardson

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 30.9° N, 99.9° E.

Settlement difficulty here
30.5/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
1.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
1406th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is temperature about -14 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Richardson'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.

Richardson's satellite craters

The IAU names smaller craters around a major one by letter. Richardson has 2, and each shares the parent's namesake rather than carrying one of its own.

Richardson E 24.1 kmRichardson W 23.4 km

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.