NASA scientists traveled to Crater Island in Utah in June 2026 to field‑test cameras and instruments for the DAVINCI mission, which will descend through Venus’s atmosphere. The site, called “Venus on Earth,” consists of flat playas and salt flats left by the receding ancient Lake Bonneville, a lake that formed about 55,000 years ago and lost more than 350 feet of water in a six‑week flood about 18,000 years ago. The dried lakebed, composed of clay, marl and sand, appears pale in satellite images and hosts evaporite minerals such as halite and gypsum. In deeper areas, groundwater pools create brines that support mining of potash and other minerals. Geologists mapped the basin using three‑dimensional terrain models derived from helicopter‑borne images taken during DAVINCI rehearsals. The maps match existing geologic charts and provide a reference for the mountainous region on Venus that DAVINCI will study, called Alpha Regio. Historical records show that the Bonneville Salt Flats have been used for land‑speed attempts; in 1960 Mickey Thompson broke the 400‑mile‑per‑hour barrier with a speed of 406.60 mph, and in August 2026 Andy Green set a record of 406.32 mph in a hydrogen‑fuel vehicle, producing no carbon dioxide. Earlier, in August 1846 members of the Donner‑Reed Party encountered difficulties when their wagons broke through the thin salt crust near Crater Island. NASA’s Earth Observatory released the image, credited to Michala Garrison, using Landsat 8 OLI data. The DAVINCI team plans to use the data to refine the mission’s descent instruments and to compare the geology of the Bonneville playas with that of Venus.