NASA Crater Detection Challenge
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made headlines recently after successfully capturing images of the Moon’s surface on October 16, 2022, during its first gravity assist flyby of Earth. This monumental event marks a significant step in NASA’s ongoing efforts to enhance our understanding of celestial bodies and improve navigation techniques for future space missions. The images taken by Lucy are not just for show; they are a crucial part of a larger initiative aimed at developing advanced terrain-based optical navigation systems. This technology will utilize a visible-light camera to capture detailed images of lunar terrain, which will then be processed to detect and analyze crater rims—vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation.
Detecting crater rims in natural imagery presents unique challenges due to varying lighting conditions, shadows, and the often fragmented edges of craters. To tackle these issues, NASA is inviting innovators to participate in a project focused on creating reliable methods to fit ellipses to crater rims in the captured images. The goal is to develop a system that can not only detect these craters but also identify them from an established catalog and estimate the spacecraft’s position based on the identified features. This project is particularly important as it lays the groundwork for enhanced navigation capabilities for future missions to the Moon and beyond, ensuring that spacecraft can accurately determine their position in the vastness of space.
The competition, which offers a total prize pool of $55,000, is open for submissions from November 25, 2025, to January 19, 2026. Participants are encouraged to leverage their skills in image processing and computer vision to contribute to this exciting area of planetary exploration. For more details on how to get involved, interested parties can visit the official project page at Topcoder. This initiative not only highlights NASA’s commitment to innovation and collaboration but also emphasizes the importance of community engagement in the pursuit of scientific advancements. As we continue to explore the cosmos, projects like this pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries and the future of space exploration.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured images of the Moon’s surface on Oct 16, 2022, after flying by the Earth for its first of three gravity assists.
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
