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The Moon · Mare · 25th largest named feature

Mare Humorum

"Sea of Moisture."

What Mare Humorum is

Mare Humorum is a mare — a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea — on The Moon, 420 km across, centred at 24.5° S, 38.6° W in the Mare Humorum quadrangle. It is the 25th largest named feature on The Moon and the 10th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

"Sea of Moisture." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1935, under the theme it applies to every mare on The Moon. Of the 22 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Latin (20), Great Britain (1), Germany (1).

Feature class
a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea
Diameter
420 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
24.5° S, 38.6° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1935
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Mare Humorum
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Latin
Europe

What it would take to settle Mare Humorum

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 24.5° S, 38.6° W.

Settlement difficulty here
26.6/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2.5 easier than the median site
Ranked
76th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 45° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Mare Humorum'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 mare features on The Moon

All 22 maria on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.