Mons Malapert
What Mons Malapert is
Mons Malapert is a mons — a mountain — on The Moon, 67 km across, centred at 86.0° S, 1.7° W in the Amundsen quadrangle. It is the 711th largest named feature on The Moon and the 22nd largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Named for nearby crater, Malapert. The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2024, under the theme it applies to every mons on The Moon. Of the 57 features of this class catalogued on The Moon, the naming categories run Germany (9), France (6), Italy (5), Great Britain (4).
What it would take to settle Mons Malapert
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 86.0° S, 1.7° W.
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 — 7% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on The Moon gets.
Computed from Mons Malapert'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 mons features on The Moon
All 57 montes on The Moon — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.