Whatever the impactor, if this rock chunk turns out to be part of it, the mid-air explosion idea will probably win out. The Barringer Crater/Meteor Crater in Arizona is 3/4 a mile across while the impactor was a hunk of stone about 75 feet across. On impact, the impactor (as well as about the same mass of the surface of the Earth) basically vaporized, with some of it condensing in the vicinity.
I thought this”meteor” changed course on the way in.
Not to start a 9/11 conspiracy thread but I was listening on the radio the other day and some guy was going off about the plane that hit the Pentagon and how the gubmints story didn’t add up but they plane was size “x” and the sum of the parts found didn’t equal the whole.
The physics I have seen on that collision say basically the same thing about this meteor, that object “x” accelerating until it collides with immovable object and then basically disenigrates on impact.