In 2007, a small group of people began an intentional, collaborative experiment in open, transparent, and direct communication about your space program. Our goal was to enable your direct participation in exploring and contributing to NASA’s mission.

Many of us have since begun new adventures. This site will remain as an archive of the accomplishments of the openNASA experiment.

BOLIDES - Visualizing Meteorite Impacts

By Nick Skytland, 10 May 2013
 Nick Skytland

We are always on the lookout for great visualizations of space data and this one Carlo Zapponi does not disappoint.

The visualization titled BOLIDES is a beautiful representation of the data from the The Meteoritical Society on all the known meteorites that have hit Earth.  The design focuses on those meteorites that were eye-witnessed when falling and hitting the ground - as of 1997, there were 961 eye-witnessed meteorites out of the 34,842 total found.

The visualization is built with HTML5 and uses custom graphics.  You can read more about it on his blog and view more wonderful visualizations on his website http://www.makinguse.com/.

BOLIDES

Thousands of meteorites have collided with the Earth since 2500 BC. 34,513 have been recorded, only 1,042 have been seen falling. BOLIDES is an attempt to visualize and explore the meteorites that have collided with the Earth. The visualization focuses mainly on meteorites that were eye-witnessed when falling and hitting the ground. Data from the Meteoritical Society.