juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images
NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. 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… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images.
NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="NASA's Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/space-probe-and-mission-datasets-69c3fe82d410a42b1e313167) on Hugging Face.
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.
This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.
Schema
Quick stats
- 529,310 total images
- 264,655 Perseverance images (through sol 5,021)
- 264,655 Curiosity images (through sol 5,021)
- 11 camera instruments
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()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
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sol_counts = m2020.groupby("sol").size()
sol_counts.plot(title="Perseverance images per sol")
plt.xlabel("Sol")
plt.ylabel("Image count")
plt.show()
# 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")
plt.show()Data source
https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/
Update schedule
Weekly (Monday at 11:00 UTC) via GitHub Actions. Incremental updates fetch only images added since the last run.
Related datasets
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About the author
Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.
Citation
@dataset{nasa_mars_rover_images,
title = {NASA Mars Rover Image Catalog},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nasa-mars-rover-images},
note = {Derived from NASA Mars Exploration Program, https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/},
publisher = {Hugging Face}
}