The most viable places on Mars
All 2,049 named places on Mars, scored one coordinate at a time on sunlight, water, radiation, temperature, ground and access — then ranked. Utopia Planitia comes out first.
Mars as a whole rates 26.6/100 to settle, and that single number is the same for every square metre of it. It is also the wrong number for a mission, because sunlight, water, radiation dose and the ground itself all change with where you stand. The ranking below re-asks the question at each of 2,049 catalogued coordinates and reports the difference from the median site — so a score of 26.6 here means “typical for Mars”, not “good”.
Water on Mars: Shallow ground ice is mapped nearly continuously poleward of about 45 degrees; Phoenix dug into it at 68 N. Equatorial water is bound in hydrated minerals and costs far more energy to free.
Ground truth: 10 spacecraft have landed on Mars, and proximity to one counts toward a site's score — known bearing strength and slopes are worth real risk reduction.
Elevation. Every score above comes from a latitude, a longitude and a feature class — never from a terrain model — so slope, local shadowing and the polar peaks of eternal light are invisible to it. That last one matters: on a world tilted barely a degree, a ridge top near the pole can catch sunlight almost continuously while a crater floor a few kilometres away has not seen the Sun in two billion years. This model scores the average surface at a latitude, so it reads poles as dark and ranks them accordingly. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually the reason — and the reason to read this as one input, not a verdict.