Introduction to Analog Site Selection for EchoQuilt Validation

Hawaii, Iceland, and Lanzarote each score differently on wall roughness, wind regime, thermal cycle, and logistics, and an analog campaign that picks the wrong site returns clean data that answers the wrong question. This post walks through the criteria NASA and ESA use to down-select analog lava tubes, compares three named sites against the flight concepts they are meant to validate, and shows how EchoQuilt's quilt pipeline treats each site as a specific patch in a broader transfer model.

A planetary cave concept team typically gets one or two analog campaigns before a flight review, and the site selection decides which physics the team can validate before the next funding gate closes. NTRS's report on the use of Hawaii analog sites for lunar science and ISRU spells out the NASA and CSA site selection criteria in detail: basaltic mineralogy, terrain traversability, thermal regime, ISRU adjacency, and logistics all count toward the final selection score. NASA's analog missions overview frames the broader portfolio as a technology down-select pipeline rather than a science tourism program, and the ISRU and Volatiles Tracking adjacencies often determine which Hawaiian or Icelandic site receives priority funding in a given fiscal year.