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The Moon · Rupes · 488th largest named feature

Rupes Kelvin

Named from nearby promontorium.

What Rupes Kelvin is

Rupes Kelvin is a rupes — a scarp or cliff — on The Moon, 85.9 km across, centred at 28.0° S, 33.2° W in the Mare Humorum quadrangle. It is the 488th largest named feature on The Moon and the 6th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Named from nearby promontorium. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1964, under the theme it applies to every rupes on The Moon. Of the 8 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Mongolia (1), France (1), Germany (1), Belgium (1).

Feature class
a scarp or cliff
Diameter
85.9 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
28.0° S, 33.2° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1964
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Mare Humorum
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Scotland
Europe

What it would take to settle Rupes Kelvin

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 28.0° S, 33.2° W.

Settlement difficulty here
29.4/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
0.3 harder than the median site
Ranked
1066th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 48° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Rupes Kelvin'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 rupes features on The Moon