Fox News is reporting that the meteor, estimated to weigh about 10 tons and hurtling through the Earth's atmosphere at nearly 33,000 mph, shattered into pieces at approximately 18 miles above the ground, creating a sonic boom that injured scores of people when nearby windows shattered.
"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, a city about 930 miles east of Moscow.
"We saw a big burst of light, then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud, thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.
Other witnesses said some thought the world was ending.
Amateur video captured the object soaring across the sky at around 9:20 a.m. local time.
The meteor hit less than a day before Asteroid 2012 DA14 is to pass within 17,150 miles of earth, which is expected to occur at approximately 2:24 p.m. EST today.
The site of the Chelyabinsk strike is about 3,000 miles west of Tunguska which was the site of the largest explosion of a space object plunging to earth in 1908. The blast associated with this strike is believed to have been about 10 megatons and level some 80 million trees.
As Fox explains, scientists believe it was a large meteor strike that pummeled Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Such an explosion would have caused vast amounts of dust to blanket the sky for decades, thus drastically altering the climate on Earth.
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