Mars data, free to reuse

For journalists, researchers, and educators

Reproduce these figures, maps and screenshots freely, including commercially, with the credit "azmth.space" linked where possible. No permission needed. The underlying coordinates come from NASA, HiRISE, NSSDCA, ESA and CNSA sources cited row by row; credit them too where you lean on a specific position. Everything is provided as-is, and the limitations below are worth two minutes of your time before you plot anything.

Endpoints

All endpoints allow cross-origin requests. In Google Sheets: =IMPORTDATA("https://azmth.space/data/mars-sites.csv"). From a terminal: curl https://azmth.space/data/mars-sites.json.

Columns

• slug: Stable identifier, also the page URL segment.
• name: Mission or object name as the catalogue presents it.
• entity: Operating organisation or organisations.
• type: flyby, orbiter, soft-lander, penetrator, rover, helicopter, aircraft, sample-return, sample-depot, descent-hardware, artefact, analogue, program or topic.
• outcome: success, operating, ended, partial, failure, in-development, planned, cancelled, debris or reference. "ended" means it succeeded and later stopped, which is distinct from failure.
• era: Catalogue era grouping.
• latitude: Areocentric latitude, degrees north.
• longitude_east_360: East longitude 0 to 360, as published by the source.
• longitude_east_180: The same longitude as -180 to 180.
• site_name: The place, and how confident the fix is. Read this.
• coordinate_source: URL for the coordinate specifically.
• facts_checked: ISO date the entry was last verified.
• page: Canonical page for this entry.

Limitations

• Coordinate quality varies enormously and the dataset does not hide that. Some rows are HiRISE identifications of the actual hardware on the ground, accurate to a few metres. Others are Soviet-era published targets that were never confirmed by imaging, and at least one is a candidate identification that remains disputed. Read site_name and follow coordinate_source before using a row for anything that matters.
• Some entries describe more than one vehicle (Mars 4 through 7 is four craft, for example), so counting rows is not the same as counting spacecraft. Do not derive a success rate from row counts.
• Planetary sources state Mars longitude east-positive in 0 to 360. Both that and the -180 to 180 form are given, because mapping tools expect the latter.

Why precision varies so much

A modern lander is known to within metres, because HiRISE has photographed the hardware sitting on the ground: Curiosity, Perseverance, InSight, Phoenix, Spirit and Opportunity are all fixed that way. A Soviet-era row is usually a published aim point that no camera ever confirmed. Mars 2 has three competing positions and no identified debris field; the candidate hardware spotted for Mars 3 in 2013 is still not confirmed, because NASA says other explanations for those features cannot be ruled out; Mars 6 is a 1974 trajectory reconstruction; and the one published candidate for Mars Polar Lander was retracted in 2005. Beagle 2 sat in that same category until 2015, when orbital imagery found it eleven years after it went silent. The site_name field says which kind of fix every row is, in plain words. Do not average them together.

Stability promise

Fields and CSV columns are additive-only: names and meanings never change. Slugs are stable identifiers and double as URL paths. If a breaking change ever becomes unavoidable, the old shape keeps working for 12 months and this page documents the change with a date. Methodology changes bump methodology_version in the metadata sidecar, which currently reads 1. Coordinates get corrected when better sources appear, which is the point of publishing the source URL beside each one.