NASA Crater Detection Challenge – NASA
Crater rims are essential landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real images is difficult, with shadows, lighting changes and broken edges obscuring their shape.
This project invites you to develop methods to reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping to advance future space exploration.
In the pursuit of next-generation optical terrain-based navigation, NASA is developing a system that will use a visible light camera on a spacecraft to capture orbital images of lunar terrain and process the images to:
- detect the edges of the crater in the images,
- identify craters from a catalog, and
- estimate the camera/vehicle position based on the identified craters.
The focus of this project is the crater detection process.
Natural imagery varies greatly in lighting and will impact the entirety of the crater rims in the images.
Reward: $55,000 total
Opening date: November 25, 2025
Closing date: January 19, 2026
For more information, visit: https://www.topcoder.com/nasa-crater-detection
