A transparent screening method for Earth places that resemble the Moon and Mars.
Open data, open method, and a plain account of what it cannot tell you.
What this is
- A screening method. It scores every land tile on Earth by how closely its terrain matches a lunar or Martian target, then ranks the tiles.
- Transparent and reproducible. The data files are built by one command from stored results, and every number on this site traces to a source file.
- It has an India focus: below, the India sites we list and where the flagged regions fall.
- Flagged tiles and regions are candidates not in our reference list. They are unreviewed.
What failed
- On the Moon run, two places that should score low scored high: the Namib sand sea at percentile 90.2 and the Rub' al Khali at percentile 75.6. The pre-registered maximum was percentile 25.0.
- On the Mars run, the median percentile of the primary sites was 61.3, below the pre-registered minimum of percentile 90.0. Mars is a low-confidence secondary result.
- The Moon score is effectively terrain only. Removing the illumination weight leaves the top group of tiles unchanged (overlap 1.0000).
The ranking has not been checked against independent data. The full list of failures and of where the analogy breaks down is on the Failure-First Ledger.
The Monte Carlo varies the weights and, for the Moon only, the slope and relief measurement error, and applies no systematic Earth bias to any of the 15 Earth columns, so the reported score bands and robust-tile counts understate the real uncertainty.
India focus
Sites in our list that are in India, with the stored v1 result at each. A descriptive lookup, not a test. A site with no score says nothing about how good an analog it is.
| Site | Listed for | Score shown | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| ISRO Challakere lunar terrain test facility | Moon | Shackleton rim, base | Missing data: no tile in range passed; some tiles lack data |
| Kutch - Matanomadh jarosite | Mars | Jezero, base | Gated out: every tile in range failed a land-cover gate; most common: vegetated |
| Ladakh - Tso Kar and Puga | Mars | Jezero, base | Percentile 69.7 |
| Lonar crater (Mars context) | Mars | Jezero, base | Gated out: every tile in range failed a land-cover gate; most common: vegetated |
| Lonar crater | Moon | Shackleton rim, base | Gated out: every tile in range failed a land-cover gate; most common: vegetated |
| Sittampundi anorthosite complex | Moon | Shackleton rim, base | Missing data: no tile in range passed; some tiles lack data |
Of the 20 regions we list, one overlaps the India outline used by v1: Region 04 (94 tiles). The outline is a generalised Natural Earth shape, not an official map. Regions are unreviewed. See them on the Honest Map.
Read next
- Method: what the screening does and does not do.
- Data credits: the open data behind the scores.