Asteroid as big as a 8216;city block8217; to hurtle past Earth

It will pass through space 14 times further from Earth than the Moon.The space rock will be tracked live by cameras on Earth and in space.

8220;The entire astronomical community has reversed its thinking about them over the past few decades. Instead of living on an 8216;island Earth8217; with little or no connection with other celestial objects,we now feel that collisions with comets or asteroids change the evolution of our biosphere,and maybe even seeded our world with the amino acids that started life long ago,8221; Astronomy magazine8217;s Bob Berman said.

The Slooh website will stream the event online.

Near-Earth asteroid 153958 2003 AM31 represents 1 of approximately 9,000 whizzing past Earth at any given moment,and we wanted to highlight this one as it8217;s only 13.7 lunar distances from Earth 8211; similar to near-Earth asteroid LZ1 which zoomed past us unexpectedly mid-June, Patrick Paolucci,President at Slooh website was quoted by the paper as saying.