Investigator Rupes
What Investigator Rupes is
Investigator Rupes is a rupes — a scarp or cliff — on Mercury, 390 km across, centred at 25.4° S, 136.0° E in the Solitudo Perseph quadrangle. It is the 44th largest named feature on Mercury and the 19th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Australian; research vessel used since 2014 for atmospheric, oceanographic, biological and geoscience research from the tropical north to the Antarctic ice-edge mainly in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2021, under the theme it applies to every rupes on Mercury. Of the 66 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run England (11), United States (6), The Netherlands (Dutch) (4), France (4).
What it would take to settle Investigator Rupes
Mercury scores 46 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 25.4° S, 136.0° E.
What this spot has going for it is sunlight — 90% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Mercury gets. What works against it is water — outside the ice-bearing latitudes.
Computed from Investigator Rupes's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Mercury (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Mercury 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 rupes features on Mercury
All 66 rupes on Mercury — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.