Getting to know the meteorites
Meteorites are meteors that have survived the plunge from the sky and landed on Earth. Today I looked into meteorites data collected by The Meteoritical Society in NASA database. What I want to uncover in this exploration is the classification and mass of meteorites by year and geographical location of the landing.
After some preprocessing to group 386 meteorites into 3 buckets (iron, stony or mixture) based on the classification, I drew size and number of meteorites on a timeline, spreading it out vertically by its mass and annotating the name and mass in tons. We can observe:
- The biggest meteorites that made it to the earth are mostly iron
- Hoba, a 60-ton meteroties that landed in 1920, is world’s largest so far
- The majority are stony ones but relatively small. Intuitively this makes sense as they are more likely to disintegrate due to their material while entering the Earth’s atmosphere
- There are a lot of meteorites data collected 1980s onwards
To zoom in to the smaller meteorites, we can transform y axis to show logarithmic scale of mass, which revealed many more datapoints of stony ones ranging from a few grams to a few kilograms recorded in the recent decades. This is drawn on pure dark background for better visibility.
Next I set out to map the landings. When there are too many points overlapping, heatmap offers a better view than scatter plot.
We can see meteorite retrieval activities in Antarctica. If split out by meteorite types, it seems iron ones are less often collected from Antarctica, which could have something to do with hot mass of iron meteorites sink deeper beneath the ice while it’s easier to retrieve small stony ones on the white continent. More on that from this BBC article.
This is #day18 of my #100dayprojects on data science and visual storytelling. The code is on github. I have been away for a week due to vacation 🌠.
Thanks for reading and ideas & suggestions are welcomed.
