Mare Crisium

Mare Crisium (Latin, 'Sea of Crises) is a lunar mare located in the Moon's Crisium basin, just northeast of Mare Tranquillitatis. Mare Crisium is a basin of Nectarian age.The geologic history of the Moon. USGS Professional Paper 1348. By Don E. Wilhelms, John F. McCauley, and Newell J. Trask. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington: 1987. Table 9-3. It was formed by the flooding of basaltic lava that filled an ancient asteroid impact.

Characteristics

Mare Crisium is in diameter, and in area. It has a very flat floor, with a ring of wrinkle ridges (dorsa) toward its outer boundaries. These are Dorsa Tetyaev, Dorsum Oppel, Dorsum Termier, and Dorsa Harker. The cape-like feature protruding into the southeast of the mare is Promontorium Agarum. On the western rim of the mare is the palimpsest Yerkes, and Lick to the southeast is similar. The crater Picard is located just to the east of Yerkes, and northwest of Picard are the craters Peirce and Swift. The ray system of the crater Proclus overlie the northwestern mare. Mare Anguis can be seen northeast of Mare Crisium.

A mass concentration (mascon), or gravitational high, was identified in the center of Mare Crisium from Doppler tracking of the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in 1968. The mascon was confirmed and mapped at higher resolution with later orbiters such as Lunar Prospector and GRAIL.

Names Like most of the other maria on the Moon, Mare Crisium was named by Giovanni Riccioli, whose 1651 nomenclature system has become standardized.Ewen A. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.61.

By the 17th century, Mare Crisium had acquired the name 'Caspian Sea', being labelled as such by Thomas Harriot, Pierre Gassendi and Michael van Langren. Ewen A. Whitaker speculates that it received this name because it occupies roughly the same position on the Moon's face as does the Caspian Sea on Earth, with respect to maps of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.Ewen A. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.7. The English astronomer William Gilbert's map of c.1600 calls it 'Brittania' after Britain.

Observation and exploration Mare Crisium is just visible from Earth with the naked eye as a small dark spot on the edge of the Moon's face.

It is the site of the 21 July 1969 crash-landing of the Soviet Luna 15 probe, occurring the same day that two Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the Moon. A soil sample from Mare Crisium was successfully brought to Earth on 22 August 1976 by the Soviet lunar mission Luna 24.NASA reference

Firefly Aerospace's lunar lander carried NASA-sponsored experiments and commercial payloads as a part of Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to Mare Crisium. Landing was completed successfully on 2 March 2025 northwest of Mons Latreille at . The mission ended on 16 March 2025 after completing all of its objectives, including a test of an electrodynamic dust shield to prevent lunar regolith building up on spacecraft surfaces.

In popular culture and literature Mare Crisium is used as the location for Arthur C. Clarke's 1948 seminal short-story "The Sentinel". In the story, a mysterious structure is found in one of the mountains surrounding the Mare. Clarke describes Mare Crisium as follows:

In Warhammer 40k, it is the location of the Somnus Citadel, a base for the Sisters of Silence.

Mare Crisium is seen and mentioned throughout the 2022 film Moonfall. It is where the alien A.I. swarm and the astronauts go into the Moon to reach the megastructure beneath the surface.

In Call of Duty: Black Ops (remastered in Call of Duty: Black Ops III), Mare Crisium is the site of a secret, moon base called Griffin Station. The moon base was created by Dr. Edward Richtofen, an evil, mad scientist, to study the mysterious, Moon Pyramid Device, which allows its user to harness dark powers to control zombies and reality itself. Returning from the fabled Shangri-La with his team and tools, they travel to Griffin Station in 2025 to enact Richtofen's plan. After taking control of the pyramid, the moon base artificial intelligence, Dr. Maxis, contacts the remaining team, & recruits them to stop Richtofen to "minimize" the damage. After finishing the calculations, Maxis sends 3 powerful rockets to Earth, destroying it and weakening Richtofen, leading into the events of Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

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