Geological Chronicle
Joliot is a large impact crater measuring 172.79 kilometers across, situated on the lunar far side just beyond the eastern limb. Because of its position near the limb, the crater comes into view from Earth only during favorable librations, when it is seen from the side. The crater lies at the northern fringes of the flooded terrain associated with Mare Marginis to the south, with Lyapunov attached along its western rim and Lomonosov located to the east-northeast.
The outer rim of Joliot is worn and degraded, particularly across its northern and southern sections where the wall consists of irregular ridges and craterlets, while the western rim is buttressed by adjacent crater formations. Within the rim, the floor was flooded by basaltic lava, leaving a flattened surface with a lower albedo than the surrounding terrain. The floor preserves several ghost-crater remnants, including an elongated formation west of the midpoint, and parts of the surface are coated in ray material from the fresh crater Giordano Bruno to the northeast.
At the midpoint of the floor rises a central peak formation where infrared observations have detected pure crystalline plagioclase. The crater is named for French physicist and Nobel laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie.