Apollo (crater)

Apollo

Oblique Lunar Orbiter 5 image
Coordinates	36°06′S 151°48′W / 36.1°S 151.8°W / -36.1; -151.8
Diameter	537 km[1]
Colongitude	161° at sunrise
Eponym	Project Apollo

Apollo, also called the Apollo basin, is an enormous impact crater located in the southern hemisphere on the far side of the Moon. This formation dwarfs the large crater Oppenheimer that is located next to the western rim. The crater Barringer lies across the northern wall. To the southeast is the crater Anders, and Kleymenov is just to the east of the rim.

Apollo is a double-ringed walled plain (or basin) whose inner ring is roughly half the diameter of the outer wall. Both the outer wall and the interior have been heavily worn and eroded by subsequent impacts, so that significant parts of the outer and inner walls now consist of irregular and incised sections of mountainous arcs.

The interior floor is covered in a multitude of craters of various sizes, some of which have been named for people associated with the Apollo program or other NASA projects.

Sections of Apollo's interior have been resurfaced with lava, leaving patches of the floor with a lower albedo than the surroundings. There is a large patch of this lunar mare in the middle part of the inner ring, which contains some ray system markings. A long stretch of the mare lies along the southern part of the crater. There is also a smaller section near the western rim.

Prior to formal naming in 1970 by the IAU,^[2] the crater was known as Basin XVI.^[3]

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  Topographic map
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  Gravity map based on GRAIL