'Meteorite' explodes in night sky over Russian city (video)

Drivers in the northern Russian city of Murmansk were stunned to see a suspected meteorite speed across the sky on Saturday morning.

The fireball illuminated the dark skies just after 2am and came after NASA announced it is preparing a report revealing the only thing "preventing a city-killer sized asteroid is blind luck".

RT reports that a number of drivers with cameras filmed the bright blue explosion.

Observers identified the object as a meteorite, but this has not been confirmed by officials. Some said it may have been space debris re-entering the atmosphere.

Earlier this month, a Norwegian skydiver captured the unbelievable moment he was almost hit by a falling meteorite.

Anders Helstrup recorded the falling rock as he completed a skydive and was not hurt.

"I got the feeling that there was something, but I didn't register what was happening," he told NKR.

But when he looked at the film he knew he had caught something very, very rare on camera. In fact, it was the first ever film of a meteorite fragment falling to Earth at terminal velocity - a process known as "dark flight".

And in October, a lucky photographer captured the rare moment a fireball lit up the sky above Sligachan on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

The rare event was accidentally captured by landscape photographer Marcus McAdam, who was working on a time lapse video showing a year on Skye condensed into minutes.

Describing what he discovered, Marcus told Rex Features: "As I was loading the images onto my computer, one thumbnail stood out as being quite different to the others, so I enlarged it and saw a huge streak across the sky".

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