juliensimon/meteorite-database

Meteorite Database

Part of the Planetary Science Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Catalogue of 1,180 known meteorites sourced from Wikidata, covering mass, classification, fall date, country of recovery, and geographic coordinates.

Dataset description

Meteorites are extraterrestrial rocks that survive passage through Earth's atmosphere and reach the surface. They are classified by mineralogy and petrology (e.g., chondrites, achondrites, iron meteorites) and recorded either as falls (witnessed descent) or finds (recovered without observation).

This dataset aggregates Wikidata entries for all entities of type Q60186 (meteorite), pulling structured properties including mass (P2067), fall/discovery date (P585/P575), country (P17), coordinates (P625), and mineralogical class (via P31 subclass hierarchy). It complements NASA and Meteoritical Society databases with Wikidata's multilingual, cross-linked knowledge graph.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q1029)
name	string	Meteorite name
fall_date	string	Date of fall or recovery (YYYY-MM-DD)
mass_g	float	Mass in grams
classification	string	Mineralogical/petrological classification
country	string	Country of recovery
latitude	float	Recovery latitude (decimal degrees)
longitude	float	Recovery longitude (decimal degrees)

Quick stats

• 1,180 meteorites total
• 368 with recorded mass
• 415 with geographic coordinates
• 125 with classification
• 55 countries of recovery
• Heaviest: Allende meteorite (2,000,000 g)
• Top countries: United States (39), Australia (13), Argentina (10), Germany (10), France (9)
• Top classifications: iron meteorite (21), chondrite (17), H chondrite (17), L chondrite (11), ordinary chondrite (11)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/meteorite-database", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Heaviest meteorites
print(df.nlargest(10, "mass_g")[["name", "mass_g", "country", "classification"]])

# Meteorites by country
print(df["country"].value_counts().head(10))

# Meteorites with coordinates (mappable)
mappable = df.dropna(subset=["latitude", "longitude"])
print(f"{len(mappable):,} meteorites with coordinates")

# Filter by classification
chondrites = df[df["classification"].str.contains("chondrite", case=False, na=False)]
print(f"{len(chondrites):,} chondrites")

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Meteorites identified via property P31 (instance of) = Q60186 (meteorite). Data is community-curated and cross-referenced with the Meteoritical Bulletin Database.

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Run manually to capture interim additions.

Related datasets

• impact-craters -- Earth impact crater database
• fireballs -- NASA fireball and bolide events

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{meteorite_database,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Meteorite Database},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/meteorite-database},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)