Prepare Data

Read Data: Meteorite Landings and Near Earth Objects from NASA’s website.

For the Meteorite Landings, I initially pulled data using NASA’s API. Unfortunately, I found out very late that NASA places an hourly limit of 1,000 requests per hour. In order to get higher rate limits, one needs to contact NASA. Due to this reason, I had to use a CSV file to perform my analysis. I have however, still pulled the 1,000 rows from the API to show some of the data cleaning exercises I performed. The CSV data is cleaner and easier to work with than the API data. Most of the work for this project was on data selection, cleaning and preparation.

For Near Earth Objects (NEOs), I used a dataset downloaded from NASA’s website showing NEOs 1 year into the future.

Clean Data

  1. Clean and Wrangle Meteorite Landings for dataset from the API. After cleaning this dataset contains 1000 rows and 14 columns.

  2. Clean and wrangle Meteorite Landings for dataset from CSV file. The cleaned dataframe contains 45716 rows and 12 columns.

  3. Clean and wrangle NEO dataset from CSV file.The cleaned dataframe contains 109 rows and 14 columns.

A study of Meteorite Landings

Meteoroids are known as “space rocks” and their sizes range from dust grains to small asteroids. Most are pieces of other bodies of rocks that have been broken off. They can come from comets, asteroids, from the Moon, and other planets. Some meteoroids can be rocky, or metallic, or a mixture of rock, and metal. Meteoroids entering the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and burn up, are known as meteors. They are also referred to as “shooting stars”. When a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and hits the ground, it is called a meteorite. When there are lots of meteors in the night sky, there is a meteor shower.

Top 10 Meteorite Landings by Mass

name id nametype recclass mass fall year country reclat reclong
Hoba 11890 Valid Iron, IVB 60000000 Found 1920 Namibia -19.58333 17.91667
Cape York 5262 Valid Iron, IIIAB 58200000 Found 1818 NA 76.13333 -64.93333
Campo del Cielo 5247 Valid Iron, IAB-MG 50000000 Found 1575 Argentina -27.46667 -60.58333
Canyon Diablo 5257 Valid Iron, IAB-MG 30000000 Found 1891 USA 35.05000 -111.03333
Armanty 2335 Valid Iron, IIIE 28000000 Found 1898 China 47.00000 88.00000
Gibeon 10912 Valid Iron, IVA 26000000 Found 1836 Namibia -25.50000 18.00000
Chupaderos 5363 Valid Iron, IIIAB 24300000 Found 1852 Mexico 27.00000 -105.10000
Mundrabilla 16852 Valid Iron, IAB-ung 24000000 Found 1911 Australia -30.78333 127.55000
Sikhote-Alin 23593 Valid Iron, IIAB 23000000 Fell 1947 Russia 46.16000 134.65333
Bacubirito 4919 Valid Iron, ungrouped 22000000 Found 1863 Mexico 26.20000 -107.83333

All Known Meteorite Landings in the 21st Century

When you look at this map you can see that most meteorite landings are over land. This is probably because the ones falling in the oceans are probably rarely recorded. If you hover over the circles on this map, it will show you the latitude and the longitude information of the locations. If you click on the circles, it will display all of the details of the particular meteorite.

This graph shows 100 meteorites with the largest mass. Meteorites are categorized as “Fell” or “Found”. These categories are shown here in different colors.

Top 100 Meteorite Landings on a Map.

If you hover over the circles on this map, it will show you the latitude and the longitude information of the locations. If you click on the circles, it will display all of the details of the particular meteorite.

Next shown are 20 countries with the most meteorite landings

For this graph, Antarctica, which is listed both as a country and a continent in the cleaned dataset has been excluded as Antarctica is technically not a country. The country Oman with 3094 landings comes out on the top. Oman is a country located in southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula where the Persian Gulf meets the Arabian Sea. Oman is a monarchy and has many oil and gas pipelines.

A look at the median Meteorite Landings by Continent

As Antarctica does not have any countries, it is not possible to get a true median. The total number of Meteorite Landings in Antarctica is greater than any other continent at 20,161. Not including Antarctica, the continent with the highest median landing is Africa at 6.

A Study of Near Earth Objects

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are defined as “any small body (comet or asteroid) passing within 1.3 astronomical unit (au) of the Sun”. 1 au is the distance from Earth to Sun = ~ 93 million miles. An NEO is considered to be a Potentially Hazardous Object (PHO) if it passes within 0.05 au of Earth’s orbit. All data in this NEO dataset is less than 0.05 au and therefore, all the objects can be considered to be a PHO.

Ten Closest NEOs over the Next Year

CA DistanceNominal (au) CA DistanceMinimum (au) V relative(km/s) Diameter mean_diameter close_approach_date
0.00253 0.00253 4.93 4.5 m - 10 m 7.25 2022-05-09
0.00358 0.00323 12.58 14 m - 31 m 22.50 2022-10-15
0.00369 0.00298 6.92 6.1 m - 14 m 10.05 2023-02-17
0.00459 0.00458 5.91 64 m - 140 m 102.00 2022-12-15
0.00516 0.00516 10.10 140 m - 310 m 225.00 2022-12-27
0.00641 0.00096 7.73 2.9 m - 6.5 m 4.70 2022-11-16
0.00691 0.00691 10.47 51 m - 110 m 80.50 2022-12-25
0.00704 0.00586 8.20 40 m - 90 m 65.00 2022-05-15
0.00762 0.00762 13.49 130 m - 280 m 205.00 2022-11-23
0.00770 0.00360 5.95 6.1 m - 14 m 10.05 2022-11-08

Mean Diameter of NEOs in a Histogram

This histogram is right skewed. Most of the mean diameters are between 3 and 117. The two NEOs with mean diameters of 516, 594, and 606 can be considered to be outliers.

NEOs by Distance from Earth, their Relative Velocity, and Mean Diameter

Here all the NEOs are PHOs as their distance is within 0.05 au. The NEOs with the smallest distance, largest velocity, and the largest diameters are the most dangerous.

In the graph above the size and color of the points represent the mean diameter.