Gibbs

(formerly Hecataeus D)

Lat: 18.4°S, Long: 84.3°E, Diam: 76 km, Depth: 3.96 km, Rükl: 60

Images

Depth data from Kurt Fisher database
- Westfall, 2000: 3.96 km
The bright ray-crater on the northeast rim of Gibbs is described (and depicted as an extreme close-up photograph!!!) in NASA SP-362, APOLLO OVER THE MOON; A VIEW FROM ORBIT, Chapter 5: Craters (Part 2), Figure 116. This appears to be an oblique impact on Clementine images but the high res view shows the rays are controlled by topography, not impact angle.

Named for Josiah Willard Gibbs (February 11, 1839 – April 28, 1903), a preeminent American mathematical-engineer, theoretical physicist, and chemist noted for his famed 1876 publication of On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, a graphical analysis of multi-phase chemical systems, which laid the basis for a large part of modern-day science. Being one of the greatest American scientists of the nineteenth century, he devised much of the theoretical foundation for chemical thermodynamics as well as physical chemistry. As a mathematician, he was an inventor of vector analysis. He spent his entire career at Yale, which awarded him the first American Ph.D. in engineering in 1863.
Name given to a formerly lettered crater by Arthur and Whitaker in Rectified Lunar Atlas (1963) and approved by IAU in 1964 (Whitaker, 1999, p. 234).
Gibby (D.Caes's nickname for the officially unnamed high-albedo ray craterlet on the rim of Gibbs) (inspired by Mark Robinson's Chappy on the rim of Chaplygin).

Branched Impact Melts (the high-albedo ray craterlet on the rim of Gibbs).

Harold Hill. A Portfolio of Lunar Drawings, pages 226, 227 (observations of the averted hemisphere)(see also: Curie).