I’ll give the NASA scientist a break. It was the article title and not his quote that seemed to make a distinction between an asteroid and a meteor based on size. Which is incorrect because size has nothing to do with that. And, FWIW, it was an asteroid until it hit our atmosphere.
What is also getting missed in these definitions is that what NASA was trying to explain was where it came from in the solar system that was important, and this is not based upon size, but the velocity of the object.
Everything in the solar system is affected by gravity. The Earth has a gravity well. In order to escape that gravity well, objects have to be travelling at least 11.2 km/s. Which gives us a rule of thumb, if we measure an object to be travelling at less than that speed, it is either an Earth captured object, or a man made object. If it is faster than that, it came from outside the Earth's gravity well.
The sun's escape velocity is 617.5 km/s. Each planet has a different speed orbiting around the sun. The difference between an asteroid and a comet, for example, is that comets travel far faster than asteroids, and are in a higher orbit. They come from the edge of the solar system, barely inside the gravity well of the sun. Asteroids between Mars and Jupiter are orbiting at lower speeds.
By measuring the speed of the object, they calculate that it was an asteroid, one with a highly elliptical orbit which crossed Earth's orbit.