juliensimon/impact-craters

Impact Craters

Part of the Planetary Science Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Comprehensive database of impact craters across the solar system — 4,507 craters on 39 planetary bodies, sourced from Wikidata.

Dataset description

Impact craters are among the most widespread geological features in the solar system, formed when asteroids, comets, or meteoroids collide with a planetary surface. They are critical windows into a body's geological history: crater size-frequency distributions reveal relative ages of surfaces, and large craters like Chicxulub on Earth have been linked to mass extinction events.

This dataset aggregates crater records for bodies ranging from Mercury and the Moon to Mars, Ceres, Vesta, and outer-planet moons. Each record includes the crater name, diameter (where known), estimated age in millions of years, the parent body, and geographic coordinates for bodies with established coordinate systems.

Sourced from Wikidata's structured knowledge base (class Q55818: impact crater), maintained by the WikiProject Astronomy and WikiProject Solar System communities.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q12345)
name	string	Crater name
diameter_km	float	Crater diameter (kilometres)
age_mya	float	Estimated age (millions of years ago)
location	string	Administrative or geographic location label
body	string	Planetary body (Earth, Moon, Mars, etc.)
latitude	float	Latitude (degrees)
longitude	float	Longitude (degrees)

Quick stats

• 4,507 craters on 39 planetary bodies
• 4,317 craters with known diameter
• 7 craters with estimated age
• 4,487 craters with coordinates
• Largest crater: Utopia Planitia (3,560 km)
• Oldest crater: Meteor Crater (49,000 Ma)
• Craters per body: Moon (1,685), Mars (1,179), Venus (671), Mercury (435), Ceres (71), Enceladus (38), 433 Eros (37), 951 Gaspra (31)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/impact-craters", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Craters by body
print(df["body"].value_counts())

# Largest craters
largest = df.nlargest(10, "diameter_km")[["name", "body", "diameter_km", "age_mya"]]
print(largest)

# Earth craters with coordinates
earth = df[(df["body"] == "Earth") & df["latitude"].notna()]
print(f"{len(earth):,} Earth craters with coordinates")

# Ancient craters (> 2 Ga)
ancient = df[df["age_mya"] > 2000].sort_values("age_mya", ascending=False)
print(ancient[["name", "body", "diameter_km", "age_mya"]].head(10))

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Craters identified via instance-of (P31) / subclass-of (P279) chain anchored at Q55818 (impact crater). Data is community-curated by WikiProject Astronomy and WikiProject Solar System.

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Re-run manually at any time to pick up newly catalogued craters.

Related datasets

• ceres-craters — Ceres crater catalog
• meteorite-database — Meteorite landings
• planetary-nomenclature — IAU planetary feature names

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{impact_craters,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Impact Craters},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/impact-craters},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)