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The Moon · Crater · 1330th largest named feature

Timaeus

Greek astronomer (unkn-c. 400 B.C.).

What Timaeus is

Timaeus is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 32.8 km across, centred at 62.9° N, 0.6° W in the Plato quadrangle. It is the 1330th largest named feature on The Moon and the 1069th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Greek astronomer (unkn-c. 400 B.C.). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1935, 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
32.8 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
62.9° N, 0.6° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1935
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Plato
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Timaeus

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 62.9° N, 0.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
31.1/ 100
Harder than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2 harder than the median site
Ranked
1624th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 27° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Timaeus'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.