MeteorIndex — Meteorite landings & fireball event database
45,641 meteorite landings and 1,065 fireballs, searchable and mapped — NASA and CNEOS open data turned into a product anyone can explore.
A window into everything that falls from the sky
NASA has published meteorite and fireball catalogues for years, but raw scientific files are useless to a curious teenager, a teacher or a reporter chasing the bright flash everyone saw last night. MeteorIndex repackages those datasets as a fast, friendly website: look up the space rocks that landed in your country, dig into a fireball that made headlines, or browse the iron giants of the catalogue on a world map.
Of all my own products this is the most editorial in spirit — no leads, no quotes, just public data made genuinely explorable, monetised through reach.
Explore the data
- Full-text search across 45,641 meteorites by name, classification or country.
- An interactive world map plotting recorded landings around the globe.
- Record pages detailing class, mass, year and location — from 60-tonne Hoba in Namibia to Chelyabinsk of 2013 fame.
- A live fireball feed from CNEOS listing date, coordinates, impact energy in kilotons and burst altitude.
- Filters for mass, year and meteorite type to slice the catalogue any way you like.
- Statistics and editorial guides that explain what the numbers actually mean.
Dataset and scope
Counters as displayed on the meteorindex.com homepage.
How I built it
The engine is a bespoke Laravel + PHP application on a MySQL schema tuned to serve tens of thousands of record pages — one per meteorite and per fireball — all generated programmatically with unique metadata. Maps render with Leaflet, and despite the dataset size the site stays quick, with no off-the-shelf theme or plugin anywhere in the stack.
The genuinely hard part was data modelling: decades of heterogeneous records, scientific classifications, masses and coordinates had to be normalised before search and filtering could feel instant.
Frequently asked questions
Where does MeteorIndex get its data?
From NASA open data: the meteorite-landing catalogue plus fireball event records from CNEOS, the Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The site states its sourcing openly and every record stays traceable to the original entry.
How many meteorite landings are catalogued?
The homepage counters show 45,641 meteorites and 1,065 fireball events, adding up to a catalogued mass of 605,281 kg across more than 99 countries.
What is the biggest meteorite in the database?
Hoba — a 60-tonne iron meteorite (class IVB) found in Namibia in 1920 that never left the ground where it landed. Cape York follows at 58.2 tonnes, then Campo del Cielo in Argentina at 50 tonnes, first recorded back in 1575.
Can records be filtered and explored visually?
Yes on both counts. Search accepts name, classification or country, filters narrow results by mass, year and type, and an interactive world map plots the landings. Fireballs get their own table with date, coordinates, energy in kilotons and altitude.