Meteorite Plotting Project

Screenshot of the Globe. Each dot represents the landing coordinates of a meteorite.

Inspiration

NASA has a lot of astronomical data available to the public online, and while looking at it, we found a very interesting data set relating to meteorite data from all over the world. We decided we wanted to try and find a good way to visualize it, with an interactive globe and plotted points representing each individual meteorite landing.

What it does

It gives a visual representation of the NASA meteorite landing data, so you can better understand the distribution of meteor landings on Earth.

How we built it

We created a Google Colab notebook and used Python's plotly libraries to create a 3D surface model of the Earth with plotted points atop it.

Challenges we ran into

The data set was quite large, and one of the issues was that the geolocation data (latitude/longitude) was in one column together. To solve this, we found a way to split the column in two, to make it easier for data processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Once we got the basic globe down and plotted a few test points, bringing together all of the data from the data set and actually getting it plotted was quite the accomplishment. It is quite cool being able to look at all these individual bits of data and imagine that each was a meteorite landing.

What we learned

We all learned a very interesting way to plot this kind of location data. Instead of just looking at numbers in a spreadsheet, we have the opportunity to really look at how the landings are distributed around the globe and how this sort of visual representation can be very valuable in examining these kinds of data sets.

What's next for Meteorite Plotting Project

We have all the data plotted, but one addition we could make would be to also keep the landing data alongside the coordinates. With some tweaks, that would mean that while looking at all these data points, you could hover over them individually to perhaps examine some of them in closer detail (date of landing, name of meteorite, etc). It would mean just another way to interact with the data in a meaningful manner.