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OrbitStudio / Lunar landmarks / Tsiolkovskiy

Tsiolkovskiy Crater

The most striking thing on the far side of the Moon, and nobody standing on Earth has ever seen it. A dark, flooded floor inside a 185-kilometre ring, with a pale mountain in the middle — a combination that barely exists anywhere else on that hemisphere.

Diameter185 km
Central peakRises over 3,400 m (11,150 ft) from the floor
FloorPartly flooded with dark mare basalt — rare on the farside
Coordinates20.4° S, 129.1° E
SideFarside — never visible from Earth
TypeComplex crater: terraced walls, scalloped rim, central peak
Elevation sourceNASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)

Diameter, peak height, structure and the basalt flooding as published by the LRO Camera team at Arizona State University. Coordinates are the centre point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Why has nobody on Earth seen Tsiolkovskiy?

Because the Moon is tidally locked: it turns once on its axis for every orbit it makes, so the same hemisphere always faces us. Tsiolkovskiy sits at 20.4° south, 129.1° east — well onto the far side. It was first seen by the Soviet probe Luna 3 in 1959, and no human eye has ever looked at it from the ground.

Why is the floor dark?

It is filled with mare basalt — the same dark volcanic rock that makes the large grey patches on the nearside. That is common where you are looking now and rare where Tsiolkovskiy is: the crust is thicker on the farside, so only an impact big enough to punch deep into it can let basalt reach the surface. Tsiolkovskiy is one of only a few farside mare deposits.

What does Tsiolkovskiy look like as a 3D print?

It gives you the biggest contrast of any destination here: a flat, smooth basin floor with a 3,400-metre mountain standing in the middle of it, ringed by terraced walls. Because the floor is genuinely flat, the peak has nothing competing with it, and it prints as a single clear landmark rather than a field of texture.

At 185 kilometres across it is also the largest feature of the four, so a selection that fits the whole crater covers a lot of ground per millimetre of print.

What is OrbitStudio?

OrbitStudio turns real NASA lunar elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of the Moon on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get one ready-to-print file with terrain and borders already separated and coloured. No CAD, no mesh repair. The farside is covered as completely as the nearside, because the elevation data comes from an orbiter rather than from a telescope.

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