It is located at the southeastern edge of the Aristarchus plateau, an elevated area that contains a number of volcanic features, such as sinuous rilles.

[3] Aristarchus is bright because it is a relatively young formation, approximately 450 million years old, and the solar wind has not yet had time to darken the excavated material by the process of space weathering.

Sections of the interior floor appear relatively level, but Lunar Orbiter photographs reveal the surface is covered in many small hills, streaky gouges, and some minor fractures.

The crater has a terraced outer wall, roughly polygonal in shape, and covered in a bright blanket of ejecta.

"The Aristarchus plateau is one of the most geologically diverse places on the moon: a mysterious raised flat plateau, a giant rille carved by enormous outpourings of lava, fields of explosive volcanic ash, and all surrounded by massive flood basalts," said Mark Robinson, principal investigator of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera at Arizona State University.

[citation needed] The Aristarchus region was part of a Hubble Space Telescope study in 2005 that was investigating the presence of oxygen-rich glassy soils in the form of the mineral ilmenite.

The crater was determined to have especially rich concentrations of ilmenite, a titanium oxide mineral that could potentially be used in the future by a lunar settlement for extracting oxygen.

[8] Such events include temporary obscurations and colorations of the surface, and catalogues of these show that more than one-third of the most reliable spottings come from this locale.

[10] These observations could be explained by either the slow and visually imperceptible diffusion of gas to the surface, or by discrete explosive events.

[citation needed] One of the oldest reports of transient lunar phenomena in Aristarchus is an observation made by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers on 5 February 1821.