LuniMartian Atlas
Find places on Earth for Moon and Mars tests.
Select a base. Set what your experiment needs. The page finds the places and the dates.
The page will show the data here.
- Lunar regions · Mars sites
- unknown
- Areas on Earth
- unknown
- Factors
- unknown
Make your experiment
The page will show the options here.
Tell the AI about your experiment
The page will show the text box here.
Places on Earth
See the places on the globe. Open a place to see its figures and dates.
About this picture
Drawn by code from open data; the code was written with AI assistance.
Select a destination to see its places on Earth.
Best places
Look closer
How to read this map
Guided map views
About this picture
Short lists
Select a place to open its place card.
When?
How to read this chart
Show these numbers as a table
What removes the hours?
The place and its hours
Select a place to see its hours of low Sun.
Watch a day of low Sun
Select a place and a date. Then see where the Sun goes.
Plan
Use the places and dates to plan your work.
Planner
Select a task to rehearse. Compare places. Plan the dates.
Tools
Search for places. Check the evidence. Save the results.
Where are the Mars matches?
This is a first pass. Select a Mars site to see the squares on Earth.
Select a square to see what matches the Mars site.
These steps are for the Moon. For Mars, select a Mars site.
Go deeper
Open a part to see the method, the evidence or the limits.
Every factor
Power and steady influences
Sunlight, UV, clear days and haze through the year
The light that we copy
How fast does the Sun move?
The page draws the Sun-path picture when you open this part.
More cautions about this picture
Show the dots as a table
Where does the low Sun last?
Show these numbers as a table
What Earth cannot copy
How accurate are the results?
The page shows the checks when you open this part.
Other limits of the data
How the Moon search relates to Mars
Each search starts with the conditions at a site. It then looks for a match on Earth.
The challenge names the Moon and Mars. The Moon search starts with the highest Sun at each lunar region. It then checks Earth areas for these conditions:
- Hours of low Sun
- Snow
- Terrain
- Cloud
Mars has these conditions:
- Air
- Dust
- A day close to Earth's day
A match there can cover more than the Sun's height. The Mars section explains what its first pass compares and what Earth cannot match.
Who this is for
Teams can plan field tests under a low Sun.
- Rover and navigation teams. They must have long shadows on real ground for hours, not a lamp in a hall.
- Camera and vision teams. They must have a real low Sun in the frame to test exposure and glare.
- Crew trainers and field geologists. They plan walks and drives. They must know the dates and the time of day.
- Students and teachers. They can open each place and see why summer nights give the low Sun and winter does not.
The page says where and when to look. It is not a site survey. The people who go must check these items:
- Permits
- Access
- The weather on the day
- Safety
Earlier work
Teams use lamps at night or indoors to rehearse under a low Sun. One rover test used the Arctic summer Sun.
- In July 2001, Carnegie Mellon's Hyperion rover followed the Sun around Haughton crater on Devon Island. The rover worked with NASA's Haughton-Mars Project (CMU Robotics Institute). It used the 24-hour daylight of the Arctic summer. That is not the same as a Sun that stays inside a lunar band. The Haughton area is on the map and in the short lists.
- Lee and others (2009) describe the rover tests of the Haughton-Mars Project (paper). It is the only professional source we found that gives polar summer light as a reason to select a site.
- NASA rehearses south-pole light at night with one lamp. The D-RATS test of 2022 used a portable lamp (NASA test report). The JETT5 moonwalk rehearsal of May 2024 used a spotlight (USGS).
- Others build the light in a hall or on a prepared field of approximately 77 m² to 1 hectare. Examples are LunaLab in Luxembourg, the LUNA hall of DLR and ESA. Other examples are NASA's IPEx test area at Kennedy Space Center and Astrobotic's field in Mojave.
- A natural site adds kilometres of real ground under the real Sun. The conditions are not controlled. The weather changes. The Sun moves much faster than on the Moon. The air softens the shadows.
- Two NASA studies say why this light is difficult. In a virtual drive under a Sun 1.2° high, the worst direction was toward the Sun (Litaker and others, 2024). A review of the risks from this light says that screens cannot copy real glare (Null and others, 2023).
- The Catalogue of Planetary Analogues (The Open University for ESA, 2012) lists 30 sites. Its "Insolation" field gives hours of sunshine or energy, never the Sun's height.
- Rover prototypes built for the lunar poles, such as JPL's ERNEST, must use this kind of light to test their cameras.
- Other teams also calculate the light at the lunar south pole. Some teams show where and when it occurs. We read the available entries and archives. None maps the Sun's height at these lunar regions on Earth with both hills and snow.
Data sources and credit lines
Each data source has a link and its exact credit line.
Licence
This part gives the licence of the code, of our result files and of the source data.
Code and page: Apache License 2.0. The data keeps the licences of its sources, listed above.
We made this page for the NASA Space Apps Challenge .
How AI was used
AI tools researched, wrote the code and drafted the text. The team lead selected the challenge and the direction.
An AI assistant, Claude (made by Anthropic), researched the challenge and earlier work and proposed directions. It wrote the analysis code and most of this page, and drafted the text.
A second AI tool for code, OpenAI Codex, wrote parts of the code of this page from written task sheets. The team lead selected the challenge and the direction. The team lead decided which factors to add, and decides what to submit.
Code draws each chart and the map from open data. That code calculates each number. The page reads each number from data files when it loads. No person types a result into the page. No language model makes the results. AI did not make the images on this page.