A man in Moscow looks at a computer screen displaying a picture reportedly taken in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk, showing the trail of a falling object above a residential area of the city.
On the terminology -- meteor vs meteorite -- via NASA:
Meteor -- Any of the small particles of matter in the solar system that are directly observable only by their incandescence from frictional heating on entry into the atmosphere.
Meteorite -- A meteor that reaches the surface of the earth without being completely vaporized.
So, if the object is visible, it is a meteor. When and if it makes physical contact with the Earth it becomes a meteorite. It looks like most of the damage was caused simply by the shockwave and pure energy of the thing in the atmosphere, which would mean it is damage from the "meteor." There are some pics of a building up in smoke that looks like it was actually hit by an object, so that would be damage caused by a "meteorite."
This factory/warehouse door never had a chance:
Black smoke rises from a factory following sightings of a falling object in the sky in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk (photo by RIA Novosti):
Check out the driver's reaction to the blast of light. Plus the camera picks up the meteorite quite well -- embedding was disabled, so you need to view it on YouTube
Didn't take long for the memes to begin:
Look at the top left of the screen:
Via Interfax:
The leader of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party Vladimir Zhirinovsky says that the meteorite shower was actually a new weapons test by the U.S., and that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry tried to warn his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, but he couldn't get in touch with him. [article in Russian]
By most accounts, this seems to have been a meteorite.
Dashcams are a big deal in Russia. Usually we just get weird crazy driver sequences...but today there actually seems to be some purpose.
Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for the Rosatom state nuclear energy agency, says:
"The Rosatom state corporation has six major plants in the Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk regions. All of them are working without any change, according to the regular schedule. The meteorite shower has not affected the functioning of these installations or public services in any way."
