Datasets:

juliensimon
/

nasa-mars-rover-images

license: cc-by-4.0
pretty_name: NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog
language:
  - en
description: >-
  Metadata for every raw image captured by Perseverance (Mars 2020) and
  Curiosity (MSL) rovers on Mars, including camera, sol, position, and download
  URLs.
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
task_categories:
  - tabular-classification
tags:
  - space
  - mars
  - perseverance
  - curiosity
  - mars2020
  - msl
  - rover
  - nasa
  - images
  - open-data
  - tabular-data
  - parquet
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/mars_rover_images.parquet
    default: true
  - config_name: mars2020
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/mars_rover_images.parquet
  - config_name: msl
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/mars_rover_images.parquet

NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog

NASA's Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Part of the Solar System Datasets and Planetary Science Datasets collections on Hugging Face.

Image metadata from NASA's Mars rovers: 200,000 Perseverance images (sol 4,859) and 200,000 Curiosity images (sol 4,859), totaling 400,000 records across 11 camera instruments.

Dataset description

The NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog contains metadata for every raw image captured by the Perseverance (Mars 2020) and Curiosity (MSL) rovers on the surface of Mars. Perseverance has been exploring Jezero Crater since February 2021, investigating an ancient river delta for signs of past microbial life and caching samples for future Earth return. Curiosity has been climbing Mount Sharp in Gale Crater since August 2012, discovering evidence that Mars once had long-lived lakes and rivers with conditions suitable for life. Together, these rovers have captured over 2 million raw images using a variety of cameras: engineering cameras for navigation and hazard avoidance, science cameras for geological investigation, and specialized instruments like SuperCam and Mastcam-Z. This metadata catalog includes image timestamp, sol number, camera instrument, rover position (XYZ site frame), pointing angles, and download URLs — enabling large-scale analysis of imaging patterns, traverse mapping, and targeted image retrieval without downloading terabytes of raw image data.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
`id`	int	Unique image ID from NASA
`mission`	string	Mission identifier: "mars2020" (Perseverance) or "msl" (Curiosity)
`sol`	int	Martian sol number (days since landing)
`instrument`	string	Camera instrument name
`date_taken`	string	UTC datetime when image was captured
`date_received`	string	UTC datetime when image was received on Earth
`site`	int	Site number along the rover traverse
`drive`	int	Drive number within the site
`rover_x`	float	Rover X position in site frame (meters)
`rover_y`	float	Rover Y position in site frame (meters)
`rover_z`	float	Rover Z position in site frame (meters)
`mast_azimuth`	float	Mast azimuth angle (degrees)
`mast_elevation`	float	Mast elevation angle (degrees)
`sample_type`	string	Image sample type (full, subframe, thumbnail)
`filter_name`	string	Camera filter name
`local_mean_solar_time`	string	Local Mean Solar Time on Mars
`image_url`	string	Direct HTTPS URL to download the raw image
`is_thumbnail`	bool	Whether this is a thumbnail image
`title`	string	Image title/caption

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load all images
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Perseverance images only
m2020 = df[df["mission"] == "mars2020"]

# Curiosity Mastcam images
mastcam = df[(df["mission"] == "msl") & (df["instrument"].str.contains("MAST", na=False))]

# Images per sol for Perseverance
sol_counts = m2020.groupby("sol").size()
sol_counts.plot(title="Perseverance images per sol")

# Rover traverse (XYZ positions)
positions = m2020.dropna(subset=["rover_x", "rover_y"])
positions.plot.scatter(x="rover_x", y="rover_y", s=0.1, title="Perseverance traverse")

Data source

NASA Mars Raw Image API. Images are captured by cameras aboard the Perseverance (Mars 2020) and Curiosity (MSL) rovers and transmitted to Earth via Mars orbiters and the Deep Space Network.

Update schedule

Weekly (Monday at 11:00 UTC) via GitHub Actions. Incremental updates fetch only images added since the last run.

Related datasets

esa-exomars-tgo-observations -- ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter observations
esa-mars-express-observations -- ESA Mars Express observations
mars-craters-robbins -- 384K+ Martian impact craters
meda-weather -- Perseverance MEDA weather station
chemcam -- Curiosity ChemCam LIBS spectra

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{nasa_mars_rover_images,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images},
  note = {Based on NASA Mars Raw Image API data}
}