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The Moon · Crater · 1088th largest named feature

Cai Lun

Chinese inventor (c. 57-121).

What Cai Lun is

Cai Lun is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 44.9 km across, centred at 80.1° N, 113.7° E in the Peary quadrangle. It is the 1088th largest named feature on The Moon and the 842nd largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Chinese inventor (c. 57-121). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2010, under the theme it applies to every crater on The Moon. Of the 1615 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (234), American (229), France (163), Great Britain (160).

Feature class
a circular depression, almost always an impact scar
Diameter
44.9 km
about a marathon
Coordinates
80.1° N, 113.7° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
2010
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Peary
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
China
Asia

What it would take to settle Cai Lun

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 80.1° N, 113.7° E.

Settlement difficulty here
30.6/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
1.5 harder than the median site
Ranked
1458th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is water inside the polar zone where The Moon keeps its ice. What works against it is sunlight 17% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on The Moon gets.

Computed from Cai Lun'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 crater features on The Moon

All 1,615 craters on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.