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The Moon · Rima · 947th largest named feature

Rimae Theaetetus

Named from nearby crater.

What Rimae Theaetetus is

Rimae Theaetetus is a rima — a fissure — a collapsed lava channel or a crack in the crust — on The Moon, 53 km across, centred at 33.0° N, 5.9° E in the Cassini quadrangle. It is the 947th largest named feature on The Moon and the 79th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Named from nearby crater. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1964, under the theme it applies to every rima on The Moon. Of the 112 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (19), France (19), Greek (17), Italy (12).

Feature class
a fissure — a collapsed lava channel or a crack in the crust
Diameter
53 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
33.0° N, 5.9° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1964
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Cassini
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Greek
Europe

What it would take to settle Rimae Theaetetus

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 33.0° N, 5.9° E.

Settlement difficulty here
28.5/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
0.6 easier than the median site
Ranked
869th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 57° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Rimae Theaetetus'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 rima features on The Moon

All 112 rimae on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.