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The Moon · Crater · 1953rd largest named feature

Tian Shi

One of three enclosures in Chinese ancient star map.

What Tian Shi is

Tian Shi is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 0.5 km across, centred at 44.1° N, 19.4° W in the Sinus Iridum quadrangle. It is the 1953rd largest named feature on The Moon and the 1590th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

One of three enclosures in Chinese ancient star map. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2015, 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
0.5 km
about 2.0 times shorter than a 10-minute walk
Coordinates
44.1° N, 19.4° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
2015
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Sinus Iridum
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
China
Asia

What it would take to settle Tian Shi

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 44.1° N, 19.4° W.

Settlement difficulty here
29/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
0.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
988th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 43° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Tian Shi'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.