An exercise in reading, displaying, understanding Meteorite landing data from NASA

In reviewing the data I was intrigued by the geolocation information included with each meteorite object. I figured it would be fun to render the data as points on a map of the earth.

While the dataset is large at ~1000 entries, with recordings dating back to the early 1800s, viewing the data on a map reveals how larger areas of "no recorded meteorite landings" correlates with areas of small to no human populations, indicating a type of confirmation bias. I wonder how many meteorites have fallen in these empty zones, and even the oceans, and we just haven't had the means to document them?

Screenshot:

• clone repo
• npm install && npm run dev
• the application should appear at http://localhost:5173/

• interact with the map by click & dragging/scrolling, or pinch/zoom (mobile)
• click on a waypoint to view additional information about a meteorite
• search for a meteorite by name (see notes for known issues)

• a Date Range Slider for user to filter the data by min - max Year
• "heatmap" style waypoints; a waypoint will have increased or decreased radius correlating to its recorded mass
• a floating List component that detects what meteorites are currently in view, and displays the information in a scrollable list (think searching for and viewing AirBnb/Zillow listings)
• ability for a user to Favorite and save select meteorites, and store this data to persist across tabs (likely utilizing localStorage or implementing a POST -> GET request)
• ability to filter by continent/country (not sure how feasible, would require interpreting the geoLocation data per entry which seems expensive)

High priority roadmap issue to implement better case validation for the Search functionality. At the present the logic is case sensitive "duwun" !== "Duwun", and there's also an issue when it comes to special characters; searching for Saratov fails due to comparison checking with São Jose do Rio Preto. In the search logic, Sara > Sao ? evals to true however Sara > São ? evals to false

Nice to have would also be the map automatically snapping to and highlighting the resulting meteorite when searched.

For this exercise the meteorite data is stored in a static file, and accessed using utility functions in meteorites.ts. getMeteoriteByName would be a GET request triggered by using the search box, and getMeteoritesByDate would be a POST request that returns data given both START and END years when triggered by a Date Range Slider (or some other UI element)

I noticed there would often be waypoints smack dab in the "middle" of the map/in the Gulf of Guinea due south of Ghana:

and viewing the corresponding data in the file revealed a number of entries with no geoLocation information. This is maybe the most prominent oopsie of this map implementation that I don't have an immediate solution for in terms of conveying this lack of information to the user