juliensimon/impact-craters

Impact Craters

Credit: NASA/Apollo 8

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Comprehensive database of impact craters across the solar system, sourced from Wikidata.

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.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
wikidata_id	str	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q12345); used for cross-referencing with other Wikidata-linked datasets	Q4636066	0.0%
name	string	IAU or locally recognised crater name; unnamed craters filtered out during processing	38th parallel structures	0.0%
diameter_km	float64	Crater rim-to-rim diameter in km; range 0.001 km (microcraters) to ~2,500 km (South Pole-Aitken Basin); null for craters without measured diameter in Wikidata	12.52	4.2%
age_mya	float64	Estimated formation age in millions of years ago; null for the majority of craters where age is unconstrained; highly uncertain for many entries	287.0	99.8%
location	string	Administrative or geographic region label from Wikidata (e.g., 'Ontario', 'Sahara'); null for bodies without administrative subdivisions or when not recorded	South Australia	96.7%
body	string	Planetary body hosting the crater (e.g., 'Earth', 'Moon', 'Mars', 'Vesta'); null for a small number of entries with missing body data	Moon	4.5%
latitude	float64	Crater center latitude in decimal degrees; coordinate system is body-centric for each object; null for craters without coordinates in Wikidata	-12.02	0.4%
longitude	float64	Crater center longitude in decimal degrees; East-positive convention; null for craters without coordinates in Wikidata	97.09	0.4%

Quick stats

• 4,509 craters on 39 planetary bodies
• 4,319 craters with known diameter
• 7 craters with estimated age
• 4,489 craters with coordinates
• Largest crater: Utopia Planitia (3,560 km)
• Oldest crater: Meteor Crater (49,000 Ma)
• Craters per body: Moon (1,687), 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()

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
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
earth = df[(df["body"] == "Earth") & df["latitude"].notna()]
plt.scatter(earth["longitude"], earth["latitude"], s=earth["diameter_km"] / 5, alpha=0.6)
plt.xlabel("Longitude")
plt.ylabel("Latitude")
plt.title(f"Earth Impact Craters ({len(earth)} with coordinates)")
plt.show()

# 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

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q55818

Related datasets

• juliensimon/ceres-craters-dawn

• juliensimon/lunar-craters-robbins

• juliensimon/planetary-nomenclature

• juliensimon/ceres-craters

• juliensimon/lunar-craters

• juliensimon/mars-craters

• juliensimon/mercury-craters

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{impact_craters,
  title = {Impact Craters},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/impact-craters},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC0-1.0