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Mercury · Crater · 381st largest named feature

Leopardi

G.; Italian poet, scholar, and philosopher (1798-1837).

What Leopardi is

Leopardi is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on Mercury, 71.5 km across, centred at 72.8° S, 175.2° E in the Bach quadrangle. It is the 381st largest named feature on Mercury and the 279th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

G.; Italian poet, scholar, and philosopher (1798-1837). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, under the theme it applies to every crater on Mercury. Of the 449 features of this class catalogued on Mercury, the naming categories run France (36), United States (35), Japan (33), Italy (31).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
71.5 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
72.8° S, 175.2° E
Planetocentric, on Mercury
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Bach
Map sheet on Mercury
Naming category
Italy
Europe

What it would take to settle Leopardi

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 72.8° S, 175.2° E.

Settlement difficulty here
48/ 100
Harder than most of this world
Mercury overall
46
2 harder than the median site
Ranked
570th
of 606 named places on Mercury

What this spot has going for it is temperature about 72 °C mean at this latitude. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Leopardi'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 crater features on Mercury

All 449 craters on Mercury — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.