System Status
The system is currently scanning for meteor events and sending notification emails at the following times:
- 4:00 UTC
- 10:00 UTC
- 16:00 UTC
- 22:00 UTC
From the following data sources:
If you are interested in signing up as a BETA tester for the Meteor Notification service, please submit a request form here:
02/10/2020 – Development Status Update
You may have noticed some changes recently to the format of the meteor event notification service. Changes are still underway, but the biggest changes you should have noticed are:
- The meteor event data is now included in the email as text, instead of a spreadsheet attachment. This may seem like a simple develeopment, but considering these emails are coded and send directly from MATLAB, formatting is not a trivial task and required a lot of trial and error. I hope to one day send the data through html and make the emails “pretty”, the text formatting serves the purpose for now.
- Meteor event emails are now customized for each user, based on the preferences you provided in the Meteor Event Notification Form. If you chose a search radius, you should only receive notification for events within that radius.
I am also working on a feature to filter events by size, based on your preference. For example, you had the option to choose “Major events only”, in the form. Currently, this is not implemented, so all users receive all events, within their search radius. My plan for this implementation varies by data source, details are included below, if you are interested. The list below includes all the data sources I use or plan to use:
- CNEOS – This is the easiest data source, because Impact Energy in kilotons of TNT is already provided. However, all the events in this database are “major”, so I would already provide the data to all users.
- American Meteor Society – the AMS API provides two numbers that could be possibly be used to (very roughly) estimate the size of an event, “average_magnitude” and “number of reports”. However, I haven’t found that the estimated magnitude correlates very well to any other data. Using the “number of reports” data, requires me to also get population density for he area, and I haven’t found any suitable API to provide population density at a location. More work to be done here…
- ASGARD – I have written a script that scrapes ASGARD data from the webpage text, but unfortunately a lot of the data is only provided as an image (like this). So, although the energy estimate is calculated by the system, the “mass” exponent given in the top right hand corner of the report is not text, so I would need to use image recognition to extract this information.
- NASA Bolides – This is a new data source, available late last year, which extracts trajectories from GLM data (GOES satellites). It looks promising, but there is no official API yet supported. I have contacted the team at NASA and they said it is possible to extract JSON data, but I haven’t had time to attempt it yet.