Accuweather.com- 5/24/13

A fireball over the Netherlands and German skies taken in October 2009

A couple of month's ago we watched Russia's fireball situation in part fascination and part horror. Since then, we have been asked a lot of questions about what that was and why NASA did not warn us? Well, let's get into a couple of terms and see if we can make some sense of this.

Simply put, an asteroid is a large chunk of rock in space. In our solar system, most of asteroids are located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. NASA can and does track asteroids that may interact with the Earth.

A meteoroid is smaller than an asteroid. What entered Russia's atmosphere a few months back was a meteoroid that developed into a fireball that was not tracked by NASA. Meteoroids are scattered throughout the solar system. More on fireballs below.