Meteorite Landing - Records and Real-Data Mini-Lab

This lab will have you analyzing real data about Meteorites.

Required Knowledge

This series of labs require you to write program code to use the following topics. Tutorials for available topics have been linked.

• Cleaning real data sets
• Introduction to Records
• Creating Record Objects and Calling Methods
• Introduction to Lista and ArrayList Objects
• Iterating Over ArrayList Objects
• Reading Data Into an ArrayList
• Writing Algorithms to Analyze Data
• Create charts and graphs using JavaFX

Missions

Missiona 1: Download and Clean Data Set

• Download Meteorite Data
• You may need to clean the data to be uniform.

Mission 2: Identify Fields and Create Records

• Open the csv file with the data.

• Identify the fields you will need to represent in your Meteor record and GeoLocation record.
• NOTE: each row represents an individual meteor and each column represents the data we know about the meteor. This data is immutable data. Therefore a record is the correct type of storage.
• Store the dates as LocalDate objects.
• Create your GeoLocation record.
• Create your Meteor record. Since the GeoLocation contains the latitude and longitude values, we don't actually need to store the latitude and longitude values separately. You only need to store 8 fields.
• Write a method that will read the data into an ArrayList of type Meteor. You may want to only read in a subset of your data at first to make it easier to test your algorithms.

Mission 3: Analyze Data

Consider what questions you might have about this data. Some suggestions are as follows:

1. Which meteors have a mass less than 5000?
2. For each year, how many meteors have fallen?
3. Given a defined georgraphical region, how many meteors have fallen?

Mission 4: Graph Your Data with JavaFX

Visualizing the data can lead to more questions and allow you to delve more deeply. Learn more about JavaFX and the ability to create charts here: Using JavaFX Charts

Mission 5: Modify Your Program

This program can be adapted by identifying your own question that is important to you and then downloading a data set or generating your own data set.

Some options for downloading data:

• data.gov
• Tableau
• Kaggle

Some alternatives to downloading the data set include:

• creating a data intake form and create your own data set that assists in answering a question
• using artificial intelligence to generate a data set to answer a question