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The Moon · Crater · 1554th largest named feature

Gardner

Irvine Clifton; American physicist (1889-1972).

What Gardner is

Gardner is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 17.6 km across, centred at 17.7° N, 33.8° E in the Macrobius quadrangle. It is the 1554th largest named feature on The Moon and the 1268th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Irvine Clifton; American physicist (1889-1972). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1976, 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
17.6 km
about the length of Manhattan
Coordinates
17.7° N, 33.8° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1976
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Macrobius
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
American
North America

What it would take to settle Gardner

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 17.7° N, 33.8° E.

Settlement difficulty here
27.1/ 100
Better than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
2 easier than the median site
Ranked
242nd
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is earth link near side — Earth stands 52° above the horizon and never moves. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Gardner'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.