Detecting Impact Craters Challenge

About the Challenge

As the most common topographical feature, craters provide important information on planet formation and geology.  Craters also inform the selection of landing sites, as well as provide valuable data for path planning and rover navigation.  In addition, craters help scientists align a variety of disparate data sets (radar, laser altimetry, etc.) to each other.

The data for this challenge consists of orbital images captured by the Apollo 15-17 and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions. Craters were manually identified by NASA planetary scientists and by volunteers from around the world as part of the “Moon Zoo” project (http://moonzoo.org). The manually labeled craters provide both training data and a way to measure the performance of the challenge submissions.

“Moon Zoo” is a Zooniverse project, which has over 430,000 registered users helping on a wide variety of Citizen Science projects. The data provided by Moon Zoo for this challenge represents a small sample of a much larger crater catalog currently being compiled. The first full crater catalog from Moon Zoo should be available in late 2011.

Overall, this challenge will help NASA to better, and more effectively, process the ever increasing amounts of orbital imagery of the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies. This will enable us to better explore and understand our Solar System and beyond.