Global meteor hits

This is not a Cesium visualization, but I really liked this illustration of recorded meteorite impacts since 1500: https://twitter.com/CraigTaylorViz/status/1286599354057400327

The data comes from NASA’s meteorite landings dataset: https://data.nasa.gov/Space-Science/Meteorite-Landings/gh4g-9sfh

This visualization leans more toward the beautiful side, but I’d love to see what the aerospace members of the Cesium community might do with it.

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This is really awesome, thanks for sharing this @sarah!

So it looks like the dataset itself is just the location of where the meteorites hit. I half expected it to have like a position over time of each crash which is maybe unrealistic I think :sweat_smile:

I’d love to see this hooked up to the timeline to see the locations of the landings over time, and I’m really curious if you can actually see the impact in the satellite imagery in those locations, especially if there’s any historic imagery you can toggle on/off before and after the landing.

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Reminds me of Wargames, like a 3D version of global thermonuclear warfare!

I suppose most craters are due to mostly vertical impacts, as glancing blows would just bounce off and/or burn up in the atmosphere. If they don’t know the time of day of impact, it only narrows down a bit from what direction in the solar system that the meteorite may have struck from. It would seem that most strikes are at mid latitude (few near poles or the equator.) Could this be due to it being difficult to detect strikes say in the snow or in rain-forests or in desert sand dunes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater was not easily found, even though its effects may have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I was just thinking, 66 million years ago due to continental drift, the impact coordinates may have been 1000 miles away from where the crater is now, if they drift 1 inch per year.

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