juliensimon/nhats-accessible-asteroids

NASA NHATS Near-Earth Accessible Asteroids

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Near-Earth asteroids accessible for human missions, currently 6,858 objects from NASA JPL's Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study (NHATS).

Dataset description

The NHATS study identifies near-Earth asteroids that could be reached by crewed spacecraft with relatively low delta-v (velocity change) requirements. These are potential targets for human exploration missions, sample return, and in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU).

Each asteroid in this dataset has at least one viable round-trip trajectory with total delta-v under 12 km/s, total mission duration under 450 days, and stay time of at least 8 days. The dataset is continuously updated as new asteroids are discovered and orbits are refined.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
designation	string	Primary asteroid designation
full_name	string	Full formatted name/designation
n_viable_trajectories	int64	Number of viable round-trip trajectories
observation_magnitude	float64	Observed visual magnitude
orbit_condition_code	int64	Orbit condition code (0=well-determined to 9=poorly)
max_diameter_m	float64	Estimated maximum diameter (meters)
min_diameter_m	float64	Estimated minimum diameter (meters)
min_delta_v_kms	float64	Minimum total delta-v for round trip (km/s)
min_mission_duration_days	float64	Minimum total mission duration (days)

Quick stats

• 6,858 accessible asteroids
• Mean minimum delta-v: 9.05 km/s
• Lowest delta-v target: 3.32 km/s
• 684 targets with delta-v < 6 km/s

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/nhats-accessible-asteroids", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Easiest targets to reach
easy = df.nsmallest(20, "min_delta_v_kms")
print(easy[["designation", "min_delta_v_kms", "min_mission_duration_days", "n_viable_trajectories"]])

# Targets with many trajectory options
flexible = df.nlargest(20, "n_viable_trajectories")
print(flexible[["designation", "n_viable_trajectories", "min_delta_v_kms"]])

# Delta-v distribution
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5))
ax.hist(df["min_delta_v_kms"].dropna(), bins=50)
ax.set_xlabel("Min delta-v (km/s)")
ax.set_ylabel("Count")
ax.set_title("NHATS Asteroid Delta-v Distribution")
plt.show()

Data source

NASA JPL Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study (NHATS).

Update schedule

Daily at 16:00 UTC via GitHub Actions.

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{nhats_accessible_asteroids,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {NASA NHATS Near-Earth Accessible Asteroids},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nhats-accessible-asteroids},
  note = {Based on NASA/JPL NHATS (Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study)}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0