space
News stories sometimes use 'meteor,' 'meteorite,' and 'asteroid' as if they were interchangeable, but each term describes a different stage or type of space rock.
A meteorite is specifically a piece of space rock that survives its fiery trip through Earth's atmosphere and actually lands on the ground. Before that happens, the same rock traveling through space is called a meteoroid, and the bright streak of light people see as it burns up entering the atmosphere — a 'shooting star' — is the meteor itself.
The streak of light is the meteor, not the meteorite, since the meteorite is what's left over afterward if any piece survives all the way down, and an asteroid is something else entirely: a much larger rocky body, generally still orbiting the Sun in space rather than something that has fallen to Earth.
Most small meteoroids burn up completely in the atmosphere and never reach the ground as meteorites at all, which is why real meteorites — verified pieces that actually made it down — are relatively rare and often studied closely by scientists for clues about the early solar system.
space
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