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The Moon · Statio · 2014th largest named feature

Statio Tranquillitatis

"Tranquility Base," Apollo 11 landing site.

What Statio Tranquillitatis is

Statio Tranquillitatis is a statio — a landing site — the only class named after a human arrival — on The Moon, 0 km across, centred at 0.7° N, 23.5° E in the Julius Caesar quadrangle. It is the 2014th largest named feature on The Moon and the 2nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

"Tranquility Base," Apollo 11 landing site. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1970, under the theme it applies to every statio on The Moon. Of the 4 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run China (3), Latin (1).

Feature class
a landing site — the only class named after a human arrival
Diameter
0 km
about Infinity times shorter than a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
0.7° N, 23.5° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1970
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Julius Caesar
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Statio Tranquillitatis

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 0.7° N, 23.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
24.4/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
4.7 easier than the median site
Ranked
1st
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is ground flat ground — the easiest thing to land on and build across. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Statio Tranquillitatis'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 statio features on The Moon