Meteorites & fireballs
NASA's Meteorite Landings table and JPL's fireball reports in Python: falls and finds, where meteorites are collected, classes, the largest masses, observed falls by country, fireball energies, and the coordinates that sit at 0,0 or stack on one point.
NASA's Meteorite Landings table lists 45,716 meteorites recognised by The Meteoritical Society, each with its class, mass, year, position and whether it was seen to fall or found later; NASA last updated it in May 2013. Beside it, NASA/JPL's fireball reports record 1,074 small asteroids that exploded in the atmosphere since 1988, seen from orbit, with their energy and, for most, where they burst. Together they are the open record of what reaches the Earth from space.
The guides here read both, explain falls and finds and why most meteorites come from Antarctica, with how to get the data without code, map the finds by country and in equal-area cells, group 466 class labels, rank the largest masses, count witnessed falls against population and turn fireball light into kilotons. Two pages deal with the traps: positions stored as 0,0 or with the latitude lost, and thousands of Antarctic finds stacked on one point.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to Read NASA's Meteorite Landings Data in Python
- How to Map Where the World's Meteorites Were Found
- How to Group Meteorite Classes into Stony, Iron and Stony-Iron
- How to Rank the Largest Meteorites by Mass
- How to Count Witnessed Meteorite Falls by Country and Century
- How to Read NASA's Fireball and Bolide Reports in Python
🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.