Discover Earth. Understand Other Worlds.
Made by Aspensia
Aspensia is a student team based in Cambodia. Its six members are high school students who share one ambition: to become engineers whose work is recognised around the world. PROJECT: Terratoria is the team's entry to the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026, and part of how its members are building and sharpening their skills for the global stage, working with real mission data, open science and the same standards professional teams are held to.
Mak Chansereirath
Lead Software Developer and Data Analyst
Built the website and the data pipeline, analysed the datasets and led quality checks.
Keo Amarak
Software Developer and Data Analyst
Developed the website, analysed data, drafted documentation and managed the GitHub repository.
Sareth Puthyreach
Data Analyst and Video Producer
Analysed and drafted findings, shaped the project story and produces the submission video.
Sun Panharath
Storytelling Lead and Video Producer
Leads the narrative and video production and reviews the project for accuracy.
Yim Pichpanhasak
Software Tuning and Quality Assurance
Refined the website and software, verified data and sources, and edits the video.
Lim Rothsothyr
Research and Data Lead
Sourced and analysed data, compiled the research, drafted content and supported the GitHub repository.
A terrestrial analogue is a place on Earth that shares specific characteristics with a place on another world: its rocks, its terrain, its cold, its dryness. Space agencies use analogues to train crews, test rovers and drills, and learn how to read landscapes before a mission arrives.
Most analogue sites were chosen from field experience. Terratoria asks the question the other way round: start from a specific region on the Moon or Mars, say which properties matter, and rank Earth sites by how well the measurements and the published evidence agree.
Coverage: 4 reference regions and 21 Earth sites were analysed. This is not a global search. A screening tool, not a scientific classification or probability.
Data and MethodsBuilt for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026: Identify Earth Locations that Analog the Permanent Moon Base Locations and Mars.
The idea and direction for PROJECT: Terratoria are the Aspensia team's. The application code, the data pipeline, the catalogue text and the Khmer interface strings were written with an AI coding assistant (Claude, by Anthropic) and reviewed by the team.
Theme songs are chosen in Settings. ALPHA is synthesised in your browser. The others stream from YouTube in its own player; no recording is copied or hosted on this site, and each remains its owner's work.
Lunar topography: LOLA Science Team, NASA GSFC. Lunar temperature: Diviner team, UCLA. Mars topography: MOLA Science Team. Earth climate: NASA Langley POWER Project. Earth elevation: Copernicus DEM © DLR e.V. 2010–2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014–2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA. Basemap: NASA Global Imagery Browse Services. Terratoria is not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA or ESA.
Other imagery: Apollo Moon photographs and planet maps from NASA 3D Resources (public domain); Jupiter map from Cassini PIA07782 (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute); star and Milky Way sky from Deep Star Maps 2020 (NASA/Goddard SVS; Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC). Site photographs: Wikimedia Commons contributors, each credited with its own licence and source under the photo. The Aspensia logo and cursor are the team's own.
Fonts: Geist and Geist Mono (Vercel), Space Grotesk (Florian Karsten) and Noto Sans Khmer (Google), all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Software: Next.js, React, Three.js, Lenis and Recharts (MIT), MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause), GSAP (GreenSock standard no-charge licence). Each library keeps its own licence.
The three themed songs restyle the home page as non-commercial fan tributes. Every scene is drawn by our own code; no film frame, game asset or artwork is copied. HAIL MARY nods to Project Hail Mary, the 2021 novel by Andy Weir, and its 2026 film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, written by Drew Goddard and released by Amazon MGM Studios. The Petrova line, Tau Ceti e as Astrophage's home and the ship Hail Mary are Andy Weir's ideas; our ship is an original design, and Tau Ceti e is also a real candidate planet (Feng et al., 2017). INTERSTELLAR nods to Interstellar (2014), directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, with physicist Kip Thorne as scientific adviser and executive producer, released by Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. with Legendary Pictures; its black hole Gargantua was rendered by Double Negative. Our black hole is our own ray tracer using the Schwarzschild light-bending equation. FLOW | NULLSCAPE nods to Geometry Dash, made by Robert Topala (RobTop Games), and the community level Nullscapes by ItzKiba (verified by Zoink); the runner is an original scene. Songs are credited to their artists in the Music section above. All names and marks belong to their owners, and none of them is affiliated with or endorses Terratoria.