Crater Detection

Detects lunar craters and matches them against a catalog to fix absolute position.

Field
Planetary science
Method
Deep learning
Data it takes
imagery
License
MIT

A Mask R-CNN detector finds craters in a lunar image, and the detected pattern is matched against a crater catalog. The match returns an absolute position on the Moon.

That last step is what separates this from crater counting. The detections are a means to a position fix, which is the problem a descending spacecraft has when it needs to know where it is without a beacon.

It is the catalog’s only lunar model.

Upstream project →

Catalog entry last checked 2026-09-08. All models →

Run Crater Detection on your data

The lab runs this on its own compute, in a container, with the inputs and parameters recorded alongside the result. Initial scoping conversations are free.

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