As India's space economy targets $44 billion by 2040, these Earth landscapes are exactly where ISRO and NASA train for what comes next.
You don't need a SpaceX ticket to feel like you've left Earth. Our planet hides landscapes so geologically violent, chemically alien, and visually surreal that NASA uses some of them to train astronauts and calibrate space instruments. Here are seven places that belong on every serious explorer's bucket list — each one a different flavour of "what planet am I on?"
Danakil Depression
📍 Afar Region, Ethiopia · −125 m below sea level
If Mars had a twin on Earth, it would be the Danakil Depression. Sitting more than 125 metres below sea level, this is one of the hottest, lowest, and most geologically active places on the planet. Temperatures routinely breach 45°C — and that's in the shade. There is no shade.
What makes it truly otherworldly are its acid salt lakes glowing in neon yellows and greens, hydrothermal vents bubbling sulphuric pools, and vast plains of crystallised salt that stretch to the horizon like a broken mirror. The colours come from extremophile microbes — organisms that thrive where no other life should exist. Scientists studying them are essentially writing the playbook for what life on other planets might look like.
Local Afar guides are essential here. The terrain is active — sulphur chimneys can collapse without warning, and the air near the vents carries toxic concentrations of SO₂. This isn't a tourist trap; it's a genuine expedition.
Salar de Uyuni
📍 Potosí, Bolivia · 3,656 m altitude
The world's largest salt flat at over 10,000 square kilometres does something extraordinary after rainfall — it becomes a perfect mirror. The thin layer of water turns the ground into a flawless reflection of the sky, creating a visual illusion where there is no horizon. You stand inside the clouds.
NASA doesn't use it for the photography. They use it to calibrate altitude measurements for satellites. The flat is so precisely level — deviating by less than a metre across its entire expanse — that it provides a near-perfect reference surface for instruments in orbit.
In the dry season, hexagonal salt tiles crack across the surface in geometric precision that looks computer-generated. In the rainy season (December to April), the mirror effect peaks. Either way, the landscape is so disorienting that experienced photographers struggle to compose a frame — there are no visual anchors left.
Wadi Rum Desert
📍 Aqaba Governorate, Jordan
Wadi Rum was the filming location for Ridley Scott's The Martian — and Hollywood made the right call. The rust-red sandstone cliffs, sculpted by millions of years of wind erosion, cast iron-oxide hues across the terrain that match Mars surface imagery from NASA rovers almost pixel-for-pixel.
At sunset, the entire valley shifts through amber, burnt sienna, and deep crimson before the temperature drops dramatically and the most star-filled sky you've ever seen appears. The nearest major city is hours away; there is essentially zero light pollution. With the naked eye you can see the Milky Way as a physical structure — not a faint smear, but a textured band of light with depth and detail.
Bedouin camps offer overnight stays in transparent bubble tents, lying on your back watching meteor showers. This is one of the few places on Earth where you genuinely feel you are on the surface of a planet, not merely visiting a landscape on one.
Deep Context — Why These Places Matter Beyond Tourism
Astrobiology — the science of life beyond Earth — depends heavily on Earth analogues. The Danakil Depression, Atacama Desert, and Yellowstone's thermal vents are all active field labs for researchers studying how life survives in conditions we expect to find on Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. Every extremophile discovered on Earth expands the definition of the habitable zone in space.
White Desert (Sahara el Beyda)
📍 Farafra, Western Desert, Egypt
Egypt's White Desert looks like a fever dream rendered in chalk. Thousands of wind-sculpted chalk formations rise from the yellow sand — some resembling mushrooms, others like broken columns, others like nothing that has a name. The white chalk against the amber desert floor creates contrast so stark it looks like a processed photograph even in person.
The formations are the result of millions of years of wind erosion on a prehistoric seabed. The Egyptian Sahara was once an ocean floor; what you're walking through are the remains of its limestone and chalk deposits, worn into surreal sculptures by the same desert winds that have been reshaping the Sahara since before human civilisation.
At night, the white formations glow under moonlight, creating a landscape that early travellers described as "a city of ghosts." Camping here — legally permitted in designated areas — is one of the most quietly extraordinary experiences available anywhere.
Fly Geyser, Nevada
📍 Black Rock Desert, Nevada, USA
Fly Geyser was created by accident in 1964 when a geothermal energy company drilled a test well and hit superheated water. The well was abandoned but never properly sealed. Over the following decades, dissolved minerals built upward — layer by layer, year by year — into a set of vivid thermophilic towers that shoot steaming water into the air continuously.
The colours — electric greens, deep oranges, mineral whites — come from thermophilic algae thriving in the 93°C discharge water. It is essentially a living geothermal sculpture that grows a few centimetres every year. No two photographs of it taken years apart look quite the same.
It's located on private land (the Fly Ranch, owned by the Burning Man organisation since 2016) and is accessible by guided tours only. The limited access keeps crowds minimal, which means if you go, you often have this entirely to yourself.
Zhangye Danxia Geopark
📍 Gansu Province, China
Zhangye Danxia looks like someone painted a mountain range. Bands of crimson, gold, turquoise, and violet streak across layered sandstone cliffs with the kind of colour saturation that makes first-time visitors reach for their phone settings to check if HDR is on. It isn't. This is just what the rock looks like.
The colours formed over 24 million years as different mineral-rich sediments were deposited, compressed, and then uplifted by tectonic forces. Iron oxides created the reds; chlorite the greens; different concentrations of silica and minerals produced the yellows and purples. The entire formation is essentially a 24-million-year geological calendar written in colour.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the best viewing is from the elevated walkways at sunrise or sunset when low-angle light makes the colour contrasts even more intense. Overcrowding can be an issue on weekends; a Tuesday morning in autumn is the move.
Landmannalaugar Highlands
📍 Southern Highlands, Iceland
Iceland's interior highlands are where Europe keeps its most extreme landscapes locked away behind F-roads accessible only by serious 4x4s. Landmannalaugar is the crown of this hidden territory — a terrain of obsidian lava fields, rainbow rhyolite mountains, natural geothermal hot springs, and a silence so complete it has a texture to it.
The rhyolite — a silica-rich volcanic rock — weathers into pastel pinks, greens, and yellows that make the surrounding mountains look hand-painted in watercolour. Obsidian fields stretch across the valley floor like spilled glass. Steam rises from vents in the hillsides. You can hike for hours and not see another person.
This is also the starting point of the Laugavegur Trek, regularly listed among the finest multi-day hikes on Earth. The highland bus runs seasonally from late June to early September. Outside that window, it's snowmobiles and expedition gear.
🌌 Which of these is on your list?
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