FRED pushes the boundaries of data availability. It currently boasts close to 800,000 times series, including international data that are mappable with GeoFRED. But FRED hadn’t featured any interplanetary data until now.

The FRED Team has collaborated with the Scientific Knowledge in Extra-Terrestrial Content Hub, Youngstown (SKETCHY) to integrate some of the data from the NASA Mars exploration rovers.

FRED has scores of socio-economic time series, the most basic data category. And that is the first type of Martian data to be added to FRED. This series starts with data from the first rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in January 2004. (Sojourner, in 1997, was too short-lived to offer significant data.) The currently active rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, provide continued opportunities for interplanetary data enthusiasts. We hope to expand coverage with a prototype FRED rover, Confidence Interval. We also hope to expand to interstellar trade data, so our users can test empirically some conjectures from the economic literature.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for “Mars” and click on the most appropriate link.

Suggested by Genevieve Podleski and Christian Zimmermann.