Apollo Basin
Apollo Basin is a large (538km), double-ringed impact crater on the far side, at Latitude: -36 and Longitude: -152. The feature was named in honour of the Apollo program and many individual craters within the Apollo Basin are named after the astronauts lost on the Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia.
The Apollo crater is superimposed on the huge South Pole-Aitken basin, one of the largest impact structures in the solar system and more than 8km deep. The impact that created the Apollo Basin may have exposed a portion of the Moon’s lower crust (see the Lunar Networks link below for more information).
This crater was selected as one of the fifty sites for LRO to investigate for future exploration of the Moon as it contains rare farside mare deposits in close association with the bright highlands materials found on the basin’s inner ring of mountains.
Image from ACT-REACT, centred at Latitude: -31.558 Longitude: -141.174, showing craters named after astronauts.
Image mosaic from USGS Map-A-Planet
The images in the last two links below are well worth a look!
