Reading the record
Every number on this site comes from one table, NASA’s Meteorite Landings dataset (records to 2013), plus country borders from Natural Earth. This page says what each figure means, how the comparisons are computed and where they stop.
What is in the record
NASA’s Open Data Portal publishes “Meteorite Landings”, a table of 45,716 meteorites compiled from The Meteoritical Society’s Meteoritical Bulletin Database. Each row gives a name, a class, a mass in grams, whether the meteorite was seen to fall (“Fell”) or picked up later (“Found”), a year and a position. The newest records are from 2013, so nothing that fell or was classified later appears here. When a page says “in the record”, it means this table after the cleaning steps below.
Falls, finds and recovered mass
A fall is a meteorite that someone saw or heard arrive and that was then collected. A find was picked up without a witnessed arrival. This site is built around the 1,063 falls with a complete record and adds the 60 heaviest finds for comparison. The mass is the recovered mass written in the table: what was collected and reported, not the size of the object before it entered the atmosphere. Later recoveries are not in the table, so for some falls the true total is larger.
How a fall page is read
The first lines of each fall page are chosen by the fall’s own numbers: the two to four comparisons that set it furthest apart from the others. The map below them is centred on the recorded position, drawn in an azimuthal equidistant projection, so every distance measured from the centre is true. Numbered dots are the six nearest recorded falls. The class section places the fall’s mass among falls with the same label; the country section places it in the country’s chronology.
Every comparison, defined
- Rank by recovered mass
- Position when falls are ordered from heaviest to lightest. Equal masses are ordered by year, then name.
- Earliest, most recent
- By the year in the record. A fall counts as the earliest of a group only when no other fall of that group shares its year.
- Distance and direction
- Great-circle distance on a sphere of radius 6,371 km between recorded positions, and the compass direction (eight points) from one to the other.
- Isolation
- The distance from a fall to its nearest recorded neighbour. The 25 largest distances are called out on their pages.
- Crowded spots
- The number of other recorded falls within 250 km. The 20 falls with the highest counts are called out.
- Times the class median
- Recovered mass divided by the median recovered mass of all falls with the same class label; shown only when at least five falls share the label and the ratio is 20 or more.
- Country
- The country whose Natural Earth 1:10m border contains the recorded position, using today’s borders. Positions on a coast or just offshore are given to the nearest country within 30 km.
Which falls have a page
A fall gets its own page when at least one strong distinction belongs to the fall itself (for example, the heaviest in its country, the earliest of its class, one of the 25 heaviest of all falls, one of the 25 most isolated) and a second distinction of any kind backs it up, such as a neighbour less than 25 km away or another fall in the same country and year. A fall that holds a record for the whole dataset (the heaviest, the lightest or the oldest) always gets a page. That gives 250 fall pages. Every other fall is listed with its numbers on the decade list, its country and class pages, and in the What fell near tool.
Cleaning steps
| Rule | Records |
|---|---|
| Records in NASA’s table | 45,716 |
| Left out: relict meteorites (heavily weathered remains) | 75 |
| Observed falls before cleaning | 1,107 |
| Falls left out: no mass | 32 |
| Falls left out: no position | 10 |
| Falls left out: position given as 0° N, 0° E, a placeholder | 1 |
| Finds left out: no mass | 37 |
| Finds left out: no position | 7,300 |
| Finds left out: no year | 139 |
| Finds left out: position given as 0° N, 0° E, a placeholder | 6,213 |
| Finds left out: position outside the valid range | 1 |
| Falls left out: position more than 30 km from any country border | 1 |
| Falls placed in the nearest country (position on a coast or just offshore, within 30 km) | 18 |
| Finds with a class label this site does not group into a family (comparisons only) | 729 |
| Heaviest finds with a page of their own | 60 |
| Finds with a complete record (used for comparisons) | 30,841 |
Class labels
Class labels are shown exactly as in the record. The plain-language meaning next to each label follows the standard naming scheme: letters for the chemical group (H, L and LL ordinary chondrites; CI, CM, CO, CV, CK, CR and CB carbonaceous chondrites; EH and EL enstatite chondrites; named achondrite groups; iron groups such as IIIAB) and a digit from 1 to 7 for the petrologic type.
What this site does not do
It does not give values or prices, does not say where to search for meteorites, and does not estimate the chance of a fall in any place. Names are the official meteorite names from the record.
Sources
Meteorite Landings, NASA Open Data Portal, data.nasa.gov/dataset/meteorite-landings, file Meteorite_Landings.csv retrieved on 28 October 2026; compiled from The Meteoritical Society’s Meteoritical Bulletin Database. Country borders and town positions: Natural Earth 1:10m, version 5.1.2, public domain. Made with Natural Earth.