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Mars · Crater · 994th largest named feature

Pau

Town in France.

What Pau is

Pau is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mars, 42.2 km across, centred at 55.4° S, 59.3° E in the Noachis quadrangle. It is the 994th largest named feature on Mars and the 388th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Town in France. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, 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
42.2 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
55.4° S, 59.3° E
Planetocentric, on Mars
Name approved
2006
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Noachis
Map sheet on Mars
Naming category
France
Europe

What it would take to settle Pau

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 55.4° S, 59.3° E.

Settlement difficulty here
25.2/ 100
Typical for this world
Mars overall
26.6
1.4 easier than the median site
Ranked
113th
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 63% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mars gets.

Computed from Pau'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.