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.

Rover traverses

The path each rover drove and each flight Ingenuity made, at the resolution the mission published, with the sol of every vertex. One file per rover at /data/mars-traverses/<rover>.json, same licence, same terms. Perseverance and Curiosity refresh twice daily from MMGIS. Ingenuity is re-fetched on the same schedule but has not changed since its last flight on 18 January 2024. The other four are finished missions and their files are final.

• curiosity.json · Curiosity · 21,990 points · sol 3 to 5,045MMGIS ships the Curiosity traverse without a time field, so each vertex is dated by matching the geometry to the mission waypoints and their odometry. Sols are exact at every waypoint and interpolated between them.
• ingenuity.json · Ingenuity · 7,647 points · sol 58 to 1,036Distances here are NASA flight-log figures. The MMGIS ground track sums to 18.1 km because it follows every hover, while NASA gives about 17.0 km over 72 flights and about 128.8 minutes aloft. Flight 53 is dated sol 860, 22 July 2023, following JPL.
• opportunity.json · Opportunity · 19,721 points · sol 1 to 5,111
• perseverance.json · Perseverance · 35,246 points · sol 14 to 2,009
• sojourner.json · Sojourner · 4,800 points · sol 1 to 78This is the rover's own dead reckoning in the lander frame, anchored at the Carl Sagan Memorial Station. 73 of the 78 sols are in the archive and ten are missing. The archived labels do not define which way the frame's axes point, so the path's orientation relative to north is not established. The odometry counts travel inside a sol only, so the missing sols are not read as driving.
• spirit.json · Spirit · 7,871 points · sol 2 to 2,209The mapped ground path is 7.08 km. NASA gives 7.73 km, which is wheel odometry and includes the months Spirit spent turning in place at Troy with a dead wheel.
• zhurong.json · Zhurong · 110 points · sol 1 to 325Positions are in the mission's own NaTeCam label frame, which puts the landing site at 109.9084 E, 25.0833 N. Liu et al. 2022 place the landing 1.36 km away at 109.925 E, 25.066 N from a HiRIC orthophoto. The path is self-consistent; the anchor is not settled. Altitudes in the labels sit about 0.8 km below the MOLA areoid height at this site, so no elevations are shipped and the site frame uses the globe's own terrain.

Fields

• slug: Rover identifier, and the file name.
• rover: Display name, for example "Perseverance".
• kind: "rover" or "helicopter".
• credit / source / sourceUrl: Who made the path and where it came from.
• publisher / url / docs / license / license_url / citation / compilation: Who published this compilation, where it lives, its licence, a ready-to-paste citation line, and what azmth added on top of the published layers. The coordinates belong to the mission named in credit.
• note: Any caveat that belongs beside the path, in plain words.
• frame / datum: Planetocentric latitude, east longitude 0 to 360, Mars 2000; elevations above the areoid.
• landing: Latitude, longitude, elevation, UTC and sol of arrival.
• anchor: Origin of the local metres frame the site view is drawn in.
• sol: epochUnixS, the Unix time of local midnight at the start of sol 0 at the site, and solS, the length of a sol in seconds.
• path: Parallel arrays lon, lat, elevM and sol: one entry per vertex of the path as driven.
• pathLite: The same path simplified to about 50 m, for drawing at globe scale.
• waypoints: End-of-drive positions with the mission's own cumulative odometry.
• drives: Vertex ranges per drive, with UTC windows where the mission publishes them.
• flights: Helicopters only: per-flight number, sol, vertex range, times, peak altitude, distance and duration.
• moments: The dated events on the drive, each with a sol, a position, a source URL and a kind.
• current: Latest position, cumulative distance, the date the source was last updated, and status: driving, ended or silent.
• totals: Length of the published path, the agency figure where it differs, and the first and last sol.

Who to credit

Two halves, and every file says so in its own citation field. The coordinates belong to the missions below. The arrangement is ours: the published layers joined into one ordered path, every vertex dated to the sol it was driven on, and the moments sourced and merged.

• Curiosity: NASA/JPL-Caltech
• Ingenuity: NASA/JPL-Caltech
• Opportunity: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MER science team, via the Washington University Analyst's Notebook
• Perseverance: NASA/JPL-Caltech
• Sojourner: NASA / JPL, Mars Pathfinder rover engineering data, PDS Imaging Node
• Spirit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MER science team, via the Washington University Analyst's Notebook
• Zhurong: CNSA / Ground Research and Application System (GRAS), CC BY 4.0

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.
• Coverage: every lander and rover that reached Mars has a row. The two Deep Space 2 penetrators are in the mission catalogue without coordinates, because nothing confirms they separated, entered or reached the ground. Jettisoned hardware (heat shields, backshells, parachutes, descent stages, ballast) shares one representative pin, descent-hardware, whose site_name gives the HiRISE frame centres for the other sites. Two rows, face-on-mars and mapping-mars, are explainer pins for places no hardware reached.

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.