Ever look up in the sky and wonder what the heck is going on out there?
Is it a bird? A lost balloon? or dare I say it--an alien?
Nope! It's
...and NASA's got you covered.
All of the data we used was pulled from NASA's NeoWs online api available here
The following graph uses NASA's data to depict near earth objects. Near eath objects are asteroids that get pushed into planet Earth's outer realm via the gravitational forces of other extraterrestrial objects.
The graph below is polar, with polar coordinates and each dot represents a unique asteroid, each with a unique name. The dot’s location on the angular axis represents the time after January 1st 2016 and extends counterclockwise until December 31st 2016. The blue line located near the beginning of March represents the cutoff between observed and predicted data — all dots between this line and the beginning of January are observed meteors, while the rest are predicted, since we pulled the data on March 2nd, 2016. The dot’s location on the radial axis represents the asteroid’s nearest distance to Earth in passing. The size of each circle directly corresponds to the asteroids diameter. Each dot’s color is indicative of the asteroid’s relative velocity, with light yellow being slowest and dark red being fastest. The green dot in the very center of the graph represents Earth. However, please note that due to the minuscule sizes of the near earth objects relative to Earth, Earth is not drawn to scale.
Did you notice anything strange about the graph above? It seems there are a lot of objects really close to Earth.
But DON’T WORRY—we are not being attacked by asteroids. And in fact, none of these asteroids are deemed hazardous.
The second graph displayed below should put you more at ease. This particular graph is identical to the latter, except this time, the radial axis (distance from Earth) is scaled logarithmically. For reference, the moon’s orbit is displayed with a white ring and the average satellite’s orbit is displayed with a purple ring. Now notice how a majority of the near earth objects are at least one million miles away—which is approximately 4 times further than the distance from Earth to the moon!
But which points are the important ones? To help better make sense of all the clutter that is outer space, the following graph highlights some asteroids with the most extreme properties (distance, diameter, velocity).
Circle graphs are cool and all, but who doesn't love a good heat map? The one we created below shows frequencies of miss distances (grouped by million) by week. We know this graph can be a lot to take in, so here's an example: a box located at week 2 and a miss distance of 0 shows the frequency of miss distances between 0 and 1,000,000 miles for week 2. The blue line shows the day we obtained our data, meaning that all boxes to the left depict observed miss distances, while boxes to the right are predicted.