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Mars · Crater · 1462nd largest named feature

Dunhuang

Town in China.

What Dunhuang is

Dunhuang is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mars, 11.7 km across, centred at 80.8° S, 48.5° W in the Mare Australe quadrangle. It is the 1462nd largest named feature on Mars and the 793rd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Town in China. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1991, under the theme it applies to every crater on Mars. Of the 1237 features of this class catalogued on Mars, the naming categories run United States (137), Russia (110), American (62), Great Britain (52).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
11.7 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
80.8° S, 48.5° W
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
1991
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Mare Australe
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
China
Asia

What it would take to settle Dunhuang

Mars scores 26.6 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 80.8° S, 48.5° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26.5/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
0.1 easier than the median site
Ranked
979th
of 2,049 named places on Mars

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where Mars keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight 46% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets.

Computed from Dunhuang's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 74% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 2 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mars (radiation geometry, earth link). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mars 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 Mars

All 1,237 craters on Mars — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.