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OrbitStudio / Venus landmarks / Mead Crater

Mead Crater

The largest impact crater on Venus, with two rings around a flat floor, on a planet that has few craters of any size. It is shallow for its width, so framed whole it prints as a broad, low ring that wants some exaggeration.

Diameter270 km in the gazetteer; NASA's Magellan captions give 275 and 280 km
Coordinates12.5° N, 57.2° E
TypeImpact crater with two rings
Notable forThe largest impact crater on Venus
Named afterMargaret Mead, American anthropologist (1901–1978); adopted by the IAU in 1991
Elevation sourceNASA Magellan's radar altimetry, gridded at about 4.6 km per pixel

Diameter and name from the IAU Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature; the naming theme from the IAU's categories for Venus; the rings and the floor from NASA's Magellan image release, which gives 275 km, and the 280 km and the largest crater from NASA's Magellan image catalog; the crater count and the surface age from Schaber et al. (1992). Coordinates are the center point OrbitStudio uses for this destination.

Where is Mead on Venus?

Mead is centered at 12.5° north, 57.2° east, north of Aphrodite Terra and east of Eistla Regio. The gazetteer, which counts Venus's longitudes eastward from 0° to 360°, gives the same 57.2° east. The International Astronomical Union adopted the name in 1991, after the American anthropologist Margaret Mead: it names Venus's craters wider than 20 kilometers after women who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field.

Why does Venus have so few craters?

Because its surface is young and its atmosphere is thick. When Magellan had mapped 89% of the planet, Schaber and colleagues counted 842 impact craters on the ground it had mapped, from 1.5 to 280 kilometers across. They concluded that one or more global resurfacing events had erased the older record, leaving a surface with an average age of only about 500 million years, and that the dense atmosphere filters out small impactors, which is why small craters are scarce. Mead, the largest of them, has two rings: NASA reads the inner one as the rim of the original crater, and its flat floor as filled by impact melt, volcanic lava or both.

What does Mead look like as a 3D print?

A broad, shallow ring. Framed so that about 420 kilometers of ground fill a model 200 millimeters across, the smallest region Venus allows, the crater spans about 130 millimeters of it. In Magellan's elevation data its floor lies only about a kilometer below its rim, and the roughly 2 kilometers of relief in the whole view come out at about 1 millimeter at true scale and about 4 millimeters at the 4x Venus models start at, with the rim about 2 millimeters above the floor. At 6x the ring stands out clearly.

The rings are where the elevation data reaches its limit. Magellan's altimeter measured footprints about 10 to 30 kilometers across, 5 to 14 millimeters of the model at this framing, so the outer rim and the flat floor come through and the inner ring is softened into the slope between them. Venus's other craters are smaller, most of them far smaller, and print as dimples or not at all.

Print Mead in OrbitStudio Watch how it works · 1:12

What is OrbitStudio?

OrbitStudio turns real elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Venus on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and colored. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from NASA Magellan's radar altimetry, gridded at about 4.6 kilometers per pixel.

Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-colored 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — takes a Plus or Merchant plan, or one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon, Mars and Mercury too.

Other landmarks

Maxwell Montes Maat Mons Artemis Corona All Venus landmarks

The night sky, too

OrbitStudio Sky, the night-sky tool, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.