Erlanger (crater)  Erlanger is a very deep lunar impact crater that lies close to the Northern pole. Due to its position near the north pole of the moon (and given the fact that the moon's axis is only tilted about 1.5 degrees), sunlight only rarely falls on the bottom, and the 2008 Chandrayaan-1 probe hoped to find that ice from comet impacts had accumulated there. Erlanger is one of the lunar craters of eternal darkness. The crater was named by the International Astronometrical Union on January 22, 2009, after the American physiologist and 1944 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Erlanger.