Information

After a long time of researching and prototyping the fact that caught me most about the meteorites was the contrast between where meteorites have been found and who is doing research on them.

My first approach to make a visualization about meteorites was to compare the monetary value of different meteorite classes. I discovered a lot of meteorite collections on the web, but I realized after some experimenting with the data, that too many collections are missing.

So I went back to the original data source (Meteoritical Bulletin Database) and discovered a nice detail. Most meteorites have a connection to an institute or private person who found or analyzed them. With this knowledge I created this visualization.

Meteorite Count Calculation

Due to the fact that most meteorites were found by severeal people working for different institutes I decided to count one found meteorite for every researcher involved. This results in a bigger total amount of analyzed or found meteorites than the actual amount, but point numbers could be avoided.

Data sources

• Meteorite Landings

  http://visualizing.org/datasets/meteorite-landings

• Meteoritical Bulletin Database

  http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meteor/metbull.php

• List of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_ and_dependent_territories_by_continent