Data collected from NASA’s Open Data Portal regarding Meteorite Landings. The file consists of approximately 35,000 recorded meteorite landings. The data includes information on;

• Type of Meteorite
  • Chondrite
  • Achondrite
  • Iron
  • Stony-iron
  • ungrouped
• Mass of Meteorite
• Location
• If the Meteorite was found

Although difficult, due to the wide range of masses, I thought it valuable to create a visualization of the distribution of masses of the meteorites. The masses are normalized to a fixed scale between 0 to 1 by;

norm_mass = (mass..g. - min(mass..g.))/(max(mass..g.) - min(mass..g.))

A normalized mass of 0 will therefore represent the lightest reported weight of that type of meteorite and likewise a normalized mass of 1 will represent the heaviest reported weight of that type.

The plots show a few things of interest;

• Chondrites are by far the most common type of meteorite reported.
• Chondrites typically have a near zero mass.
• Meteorites in general typically weigh very little.
• Meteorites have low representation in intermediate masses.

It should be interesting to look further into whether a meteorite has been found (Found) or has not been found (fell). On the next slide I have plotted the total mass of recorded meteorites - separating the data first by type then by classification.

It is notable that both iron and stony-iron meteorites are more likely to be found than the other types of meteorites.

To examine how this trend has evolved over time, on the following slide I have plotted the number of meteorites by year.

There appears to be an upwards trend in the number of found meteorites. Interestingly the rate is much higher for achondrite and chondrite type meteorites. From what has been shown, these types of meteorites tend to be smaller in size. This increase is likely due to better tracking or path prediction of meteorites.