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.
The Russian Academy of Sciences is calling the strike a "bolide explosion," which is basically a classification of meteors by brightness -- bolides being very bright (link in Russian). Here is the Wikipedia page for meteroids and bolides.
Tragedy is not without humor. This item on the Kommersant Facebook page says:
"The in habitants of the meteorite wached in horror the approach of the oncoming Chelyabinsk"
Worth revisiting the 1908 Tunguska meteorite strike that leveled nearly 1,000 square miles (2,000 square kilometers) of forest land in Siberia. The Guardian has a great writeup with some archived newspaper clips in a piece published on February 8.
Don't believe everything you see on TV. Some news outlets are saying they have shots of the Chelyabinsk meteorite crater -- but they are actually showing the so-called "door to hell" in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert (pictured below):
Another video that caught the explosion:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on the event in Chelyabinsk:
"Everything must be done to assess the damage objectively. I spoke to the leadership of Chelyabinsk Oblast just half an hour ago. People are working. Thank God no large objects fell in populated areas, however there were still people who were injured. We need to think about how to help people -- not just to think about it but do it immediately."
"Chelyabinsk Oblast sustained the heaviest damage. As a result of the air wave and other damaging effects, more than 297 houses, 12 schools, several social-service facilities, and a number of industrial enterprises were damaged."
"It was recommended that a number of enterprises stop their work so that workers could go home to assess the damage and take measures to preserve the heat because a lot of windows had been broken. That was a priority task because the temperature was minus 5 Celsius during the day and a further drop in temperature was expected during the night."
The website for the city of Chelyabinsk has some decent pictures of damage from today's strike -- check them out here (text in Russian, of course).
One of the better dashcam videos out there. You can really see the burst and the arc of the meteor's trajectory:
