Mare Frigoris


Mare Frigoris is a lunar mare in the far north of the Moon. It is located in the outer rings of the Procellarum basin, just north of Mare Imbrium, and stretches east to north of Mare Serenitatis. It is just north of the dark crater Plato.
The basin material surrounding the mare is of the Lower Imbrian epoch, while the eastern mare material is of the Upper Imbrian epoch, and the western mare material is of the Eratosthenian epoch.

Name

Like most of the other maria on the Moon, Mare Frigoris was named by Giovanni Riccioli, whose 1651 nomenclature system has become standardized. Previously, William Gilbert had included it among the Insula Borealis in his map of c.1600, and Michael van Langren had labelled it the Mare Astronomicum in his 1645 map. Pierre Gassendi called it the Boreum Mare.

Research

The second Hakuto-R mission from Japanese private spaceflight company ispace attempted to land at a Mare Frigoris site in June 2025 but failed.

In popular culture

[file:moon names.svg|thumb|right|Mare Frigoris on a map of the lunar nearside with major maria and craters labelled.]
This area of the Moon featured prominently in 'Behemoth', the second episode of the 1973 BBC science fiction mini-series Moonbase 3.
Mare Frigoris was intended to be the original landing site of the fictionalised version of Apollo 15 in the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, although in the show the crew decided last minute to divert the landing to Shackleton crater in the Lunar south pole upon finding out there is a high concentration of water ice in the area.