Rimae Vasco da Gama
What Rimae Vasco da Gama is
Rimae Vasco da Gama is a rima — a fissure — a collapsed lava channel or a crack in the crust — on The Moon, 10.4 km across, centred at 11.5° N, 84.0° W in the Vasco da Gama quadrangle. It is the 1713th largest named feature on The Moon and the 107th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Named from nearby crater. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1985, 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).
What it would take to settle Rimae Vasco da Gama
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 11.5° N, 84.0° W.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 98% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on The Moon gets. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Rimae Vasco da Gama'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.