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The Moon · Rima · 450th largest named feature

Rimae Apollonius

Named from nearby crater.

What Rimae Apollonius is

Rimae Apollonius is a rima — a fissure — a collapsed lava channel or a crack in the crust — on The Moon, 89.6 km across, centred at 4.4° N, 54.3° E in the Mare Undarum quadrangle. It is the 450th largest named feature on The Moon and the 58th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Named from nearby crater. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1964, under the theme it applies to every rima on The Moon. Of the 112 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (19), France (19), Greek (17), Italy (12).

Feature class
a fissure — a collapsed lava channel or a crack in the crust
Diameter
89.6 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
4.4° N, 54.3° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1964
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Mare Undarum
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Rimae Apollonius

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 4.4° N, 54.3° E.

Settlement difficulty here
27.1/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2 easier than the median site
Ranked
299th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 36° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Rimae Apollonius'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 rima features on The Moon

All 112 rimae on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.