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The Moon · Mare · 82nd largest named feature

Mare Humboldtianum

Humboldt, Alexander von; German natural historian (1769-1859).

What Mare Humboldtianum is

Mare Humboldtianum is a mare — a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea — on The Moon, 231 km across, centred at 56.9° N, 81.5° E in the Belkovich quadrangle. It is the 82nd largest named feature on The Moon and the 20th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Humboldt, Alexander von; German natural historian (1769-1859). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1935, under the theme it applies to every mare on The Moon. Of the 22 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Latin (20), Great Britain (1), Germany (1).

Feature class
a large dark plain — an ancient lava flood, not a sea
Diameter
231 km
about the length of the Grand Canyon
Coordinates
56.9° N, 81.5° E
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1935
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Belkovich
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
Germany
Europe

What it would take to settle Mare Humboldtianum

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 56.9° N, 81.5° E.

Settlement difficulty here
30.1/ 100
Typical for this world
The Moon overall
29.1
1 harder than the median site
Ranked
1192nd
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is ground flat ground — the easiest thing to land on and build across. What works against it is water outside the ice-bearing latitudes.

Computed from Mare Humboldtianum'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 mare features on The Moon

All 22 maria on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.