Geological Chronicle
Jackson is located in the northern hemisphere on the far side of the Moon, measuring 71.38 kilometers across to the northwest of the Dirichlet-Jackson Basin. Prior to its formal naming in 1970 by the International Astronomical Union, the crater was known as Crater 144. It is named after Scottish astronomer John Jackson, with Mineur located less than one crater diameter to the northeast and McMath lying to the south-southwest.
A large ray system extends from Jackson for hundreds of kilometers across the surface. A skirt of higher-albedo material covers the surface within one crater diameter, bounded by a slightly darker band along the outer ramparts. Beyond that radius, the rays form wide sections that grow increasingly diffuse and wispy with distance, with the largest sections lying in roughly 90-degree arcs to the northeast and southwest, alongside a narrower arc projecting south-southeast.
The crater rim is well-defined and somewhat polygonal, rounding along the southeastern edge, while the inner walls display terracing. The interior floor is generally level with northeastern irregularities and patches of relatively high albedo. Infrared spectroscopy identifies pure crystalline plagioclase on the central peak, floor, and eastern and western walls, with anorthosite bearing very low mafic abundance detected in the central peaks.