Mars Rover Photo API

This API is designed to collect image data gathered by NASA's Curiosity, Opportunity, and Spirit rovers on Mars and make it more easily available to other developers, educators, and citizen scientists.

API Keys

You do not need to authenticate in order to explore the NASA data at https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/. However, if you will be intensively using the APIs to, say, support a mobile application, then you should sign up for a NASA developer key. You can include this API key in a request with a query parameter api_key=<YOUR_KEY>.

Photo Attributes

Each rover has its own set of photos stored in the database, which can be queried separately. There are several possible queries that can be made against the API. Photos are organized by the sol (Martian rotation or day) on which they were taken, counting up from the rover's landing date. A photo taken on Curiosity's 1000th Martian sol exploring Mars, for example, will have a sol attribute of 1000. If instead you prefer to search by the Earth date on which a photo was taken, you can do that too.

Along with querying by date, results can also be filtered by the camera with which it was taken. Each camera has a unique function and perspective, and they are named as follows:

Curiosity's Cameras

Abbreviation	Camera
FHAZ	Front Hazard Avoidance Camera
RHAZ	Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera
MAST	Mast Camera
CHEMCAM	Chemistry and Camera Complex
MAHLI	Mars Hand Lens Imager
MARDI	Mars Descent Imager
NAVCAM	Navigation Camera

Opportunity and Spirit's Cameras

Abbreviation	Camera

FHAZ       |  Front Hazard Avoidance Camera
RHAZ       |  Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera
PANCAM     |  Panoramic Camera
NAVCAM     |  Navigation Camera
MINITES    |  Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES)

Querying the API

The API can be queried in the following format:

Queries by Martian sol:

Queries by sol can range from 0, which is the date of landing, up to the current maximum in the database. The current max sol for each rover can be found at that rover's endpoint.

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/curiosity/photos?sol=1000

Querying by Earth date:

Dates should be formatted as 'yyyy-mm-dd'. The earliest date available is the date of landing for each rover.

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/curiosity/photos?earth_date=2015-6-3

Filtering Queries by Camera:

The camera parameter is not case sensitive, but must be one of the camera abbreviations listed in the table above for the respective rover.

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/curiosity/photos?sol=1000&camera=fhaz

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/opportunity/photos?earth_date=2015-6-3&camera=pancam

Paginated Results

Responses will be limited to 25 photos per call. Queries that should return more than 25 photos will be split onto several pages, which can be accessed by adding a 'page' param to the query.

https://api.nasa.gov/mars-photos/api/v1/rovers/curiosity/photos?sol=1000&page=2

The database will be updated regularly with the latest photos from the red planet.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to Mars Rover Photo API, feel free to create a pull request. If you'd like to contact me, you can reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter @chrisccerami.

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/chrisccerami/mars-photos-api/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request