Eighteen lunar pits scored on four axes, with a second scoring mode whose only purpose is to show how much of the ranking rests on measurements nobody has taken. The interesting output is not the leaderboard. It is the distance between the two leaderboards.
Real working board. Data is inlined into the page, so it runs with no network dependency — same rule the other cases here follow. Switch Reading in the controls and watch the order change.
| Axis | Weight | Measured for | Source field |
|---|---|---|---|
| shelter | 0.35 | 10 of 18 | overhang_or_cave |
| access | 0.30 | 16 of 18 | depth_m |
| mouth | 0.20 | 17 of 18 | inner_diameter_m.min |
| thermal | 0.15 | 2 of 18 | thermal_note |
Shelter carries the most weight because an overhang is the entire reason a pit is interesting: metres of regolith overhead is the radiation shield a surface habitat would otherwise have to carry. Thermal carries the least — not because temperature matters least, but because it is measured for two pits, and a heavily-weighted axis that almost nobody has data on would dominate the board through absence rather than evidence.
Switching from measured axes only to unmeasured charged moves 16 of 18 pits. The two that hold their position are the two at the bottom, and they hold because there is nowhere below them to go. Both fully-measured pits rise. All six two-axis pits fall, by four to five places each.
Under the permissive reading, King 1a — an 11-metre impact-melt pit with a confirmed overhang and no thermal data — leads the board. Under the strict reading, first place goes to Mare Ingenii Pit, and Mare Tranquillitatis Pit climbs from seventh to fourth. Those two are the only pits in the set with published Diviner thermal measurements, and they are also the two the literature treats as the type examples. The board was not tuned to produce that agreement; it falls out of refusing to reward missing data.
Neither reading is a habitability model. The axes are geometric and thermal proxies drawn from an atlas, not a peer-reviewed suitability function, and the weights are a stated judgement rather than a derived result. A pit with a wide gap is an unstudied pit, not a bad one — Compton Pit carries the widest gap on the board (+34) and might well be excellent. The board can say precisely how much it does not know about Compton. It cannot say whether Compton is good.
Collected during retrieval and carried in the dataset rather than discarded. A board that hides these is claiming a completeness the atlas does not have.
thermal_note — 16 pit(s). No pit-specific Diviner/model temperature retrieved except for MTP and Mare Ingenii in Horvath et al. 2022 abstract.illumination_note — 8 pit(s). Atlas/papers did not state polar-PEL or special illumination for these mid/low-latitude pits.depth_m — 2 pit(s). Atlas publishes only lower bounds (>25 m, >8 m), not a finite measured depth.inner_diameter_m.max — 4 pit(s). Atlas lists Inner Max Diam. as N/A.inner_diameter_m.min/max — 1 pit(s). Both inner diameters N/A in atlas.overhang_or_cave — 8 pit(s). Atlas Overhang flag is ? / N? / Y? — mapped to null rather than guessed.Mars Arena is the same idea one planet over, and the contrast is the point. Mars Arena scores 1,062 catalogue records by deriving component inputs from priority and type — which lets every row carry a full score, and hides the fact that most rows were never measured on anything. That case documents the shortcut on its own page. Moon Arena is what happens when you refuse it: eighteen rows instead of a thousand, and a column that tells you which of the eighteen you are allowed to trust.