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The Moon · Crater · 741st largest named feature

Poinsot

Louis; French mathematician (1777-1859).

What Poinsot is

Poinsot is a crater — a circular depression, almost always an impact scar — on The Moon, 65.1 km across, centred at 78.9° N, 146.2° W in the Kirkwood quadrangle. It is the 741st largest named feature on The Moon and the 526th largest of its class there.

Where the name comes from

Louis; French mathematician (1777-1859). The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 1970, 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
65.1 km
about the width of Yellowstone
Coordinates
78.9° N, 146.2° W
Planetocentric, on The Moon
Name approved
1970
By the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature
Quadrangle
Kirkwood
Map sheet on The Moon
Naming category
France
Europe

What it would take to settle Poinsot

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 78.9° N, 146.2° W.

Settlement difficulty here
32.5/ 100
Harder than most of this world
The Moon overall
29.1
3.4 harder than the median site
Ranked
1912th
of 2,023 named places on The Moon

What this spot has going for it is known ground 1,711 km from Luna 17 (1970). What works against it is sunlight 19% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on The Moon gets.

Computed from Poinsot'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.

Poinsot's satellite craters

The IAU names smaller craters around a major one by letter. Poinsot has 3, and each shares the parent's namesake rather than carrying one of its own.

Poinsot E 30.3 kmPoinsot K 16 kmPoinsot P 28.3 km

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.