NASA Crater Detection Challenge

Crater rims are vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real imagery is tough, with shadows, lighting shifts, and broken edges obscuring their shape.

This project invites you to develop methods that can reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping advance future space exploration.

In the pursuit of next generation, terrain-based optical 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 imagery to:

• detect the crater rims in the images,
• identify the 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 significantly in lighting and will impact the completeness of crater rims in the images.

Award: $55,000 in total prizes

Open Date: November 25, 2025

Close Date: January 19, 2026

For more information, visit: https://www.topcoder.com/nasa-crater-detection