With so much talk about just how many places in Canberra are amazing, wonderful, ingenious and the next best thing to Betty White; we’ve finally gone and found the Worst Place in Canberra.

Suffice it to say that we’ve found a spot in Canberra that has no atmosphere, is far too cold, dusty and altogether unpleasant, not to mention it’s also a horrible commute. The parking’s not bad though. Personally, I don’t wan’t to go there. I mean, I’d check it out briefly for the novelty’s sake but it’s not the kind of place I’d hang around at. And as I understand it, the food is just dry and tasteless, when you can get it.

Now that I’ve dragged this out and flogged the dead horse, we can move on to the very interesting part about just how far Out In Canberra we’ve travelled. You see, while the Beecroft Peninsula sits 225 kilometres away, and a pretty long stretch to get to another part of the ACT in its own right; the drive I’m really talking about is 225 300 000 kms away. You’d definitely need a few bathroom breaks along the way.

The tremendously interesting thing that I’m getting to is that, somewhere out there, a quarter of a billion kms away, on the little red dot, is Canberra. Or, a Canberra.

That is, a crater on Mars named after our own wonderful city. Stretching across 3km, and named in 1979, any where along that crater is undoubtedly the worst spot in Canberra. Owing to very frosty -60 degrees on average (here’s looking at you frosty mornings), an atmosphere that’s 100 times thinner than ours, and 95 percent Carbon Dioxide (so, basically outside a doorway in Civic, right smokers?). If that doesn’t have you rethinking your ticket to Mars when they next decide to locate Big Brother filming to an off-world location, then you may want to consider the oxidised iron dust that gets knocked around in Dust Devil cloud storms that can last for months, and the glorious snow – made of Carbon Dioxide (Perisher starts to take on new meaning now).

The reason for the ACT nomenclature is, in part, because NASA has named a whole range of craters after small towns with a population of less than 100 000 people, and many of those self-same cities have skirted that rule, much like Canberra has, in that there are in fact more than 100 000 people here, thank you very much. It’s thought that either a) NASA don’t really spend all that much time researching population data to great specifics (over 206 000 in ’79) or b) Canberra is also home to one of the world’s Deep Space Communication Complexes which work closely with NASA; and play an integral role in the Mars missions even today. Go Science! With the risk of channeling Sally Field, whatever the reasoning behind the choice to include our little spot, on their little spot, it’s good to be included.

So, next time you find yourself glaring down at your skinny flat white, bemoaning the lack of a finely crafted teddy bear in your crema; remember that there are worse places in Canberra to be.

And let’s not take anything away from the fact that, “we got Mars, mate”.

For what have you, Brissie?