Dashboard Week Day 5: A notable anomaly in meteorite astronomy

by Gheorghie Lang

Today we used a NASA dataset of all recorded meteorites in recorded history (up to 2013) that NASA has access to the records of, it’s important to note that as it doesn’t include ALL recorded meteorites for a few reasons, not all meteorites are recorded as they go unnoticed by humans or are simply not officially recorded and some nations choose not to share all of their records. If it was a dataset of all meteorites you’d expect an even distribution – which this set does not display.

Anyhow a very simple one today as we had far less time, I could have taken the json right into tableau but I did a little bit of cleaning and “data exploration” in alteryx first. Looking through the data I noticed a massive surge in mass of meteorites in the year 1947. At first I though it might be a data error as the difference in in the thousands, but I looked at the meteorites of that year (in the data set) and found that the culprit was one “Sikhote-Alin” of 23,000,000 (grams). I looked up Sikhote-Alin and it was indeed a bloody massive meteorite, the largest in fact in recorded history. 1947 was a good year for meteorites.

I built my entire dashboard on this meteorite nugget of analysis but I threw in a set action (which is effectively an ordinary action, but don’t tell Andy – does he still read these?) and a bit of the ol’ transparent sheet – both new to 2018.3. I was actually very happy to see transparent sheets.

 


 

So. That’s all from me for this week. I am going to now sleep lots and play some Red Dead Redemption II in my few waking hours. Ah the luxury of a cold.