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A house-sized asteroid has been spotted heading for Earth - and will pass just 160,000km from us today.

Called asteroid 2014 UFC56, it is around 15m wide - and was only spotted for the first time yesterday.

Experts say there is no risk from the flyby, which will happen at around 4:12pm EST. 

Called asteroid 2014 UFC56, it is around 15m wide - and was only spotted for the first time yesterday. The asteroid is the brightest object in the image. Experts say there is no risk from the flyby, which will happen at around 9:12pm UTC.

The house-sized asteroid 2014 UF56 will pass between the Earth and the Moon.

The 15 meter wide space rock will miss our planet at a distance of about 160,000 km (0.4 lunar distances) at 9:12 p.m. UTC. 

The asteroid was discovered Saturday.

Despite passing so close to Earth, few if any of us will see the flyby - even with a telescope. 

Experts say it was no surprise the asteroid was not spotted until now. 

'With 90% of near-Earth asteroids larger than 0.6 miles (1 km) discovered, surveys are now focusing on finding 90% of objects larger than 460 feet (140-m),' amateur astronomer Bob King wroes on his blog. 

'We have to take it a step at a time because the total number of near-Earth asteroids is in the millions. 

'That's why objects like 2014 UF56 pop up regularly in surveys each month.' 

At brightest, 2014 UF56 will only reach magnitude +16, as it zips from Scutum constellation through Capricornus.

The asteroid, back in 2012 visited Mars at a distance of about 8 mln km, and will again approach the Earth on Feb. 12, 2018.  

The Virtual Telescope Project will offer a live, online event sharing real-time images of 2014 UF56 with live commentary by their scientific staff. 

The stream, starting at 7:00 p.m. UTC, will be available at: virtualtelescope.eu.

None of the known potentially hazardous asteroids is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time. 

These images were taken of comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on 19 October 2014 during the comet's close flyby of Mars and the spacecraft. It is the highest-resolution image of a comet that heralds from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system ever taken

It comes just says after a remarkable once-in-a-million-year event saw a comet hurtle past Mars.

After Opportunity snapped an image from the surface, an image from one of the Martian orbiters has been released.

And astronomers on Earth also managed to capture the extremely rare cosmic event.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was used to capture views of comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring.

The amazing images are the highest-resolution views ever acquired of a comet coming from the Oort Cloud at the fringes of the solar system.

And the images have been used to estimate that the nucleus of the comet is roughly half the size originally thought, making it about a quarter of a mile (0.4km) wide.

This image of Comet Siding Spring was taken by astronomers Nick Howes and Ron Wodaski using the Tzec Muan Observatory in Australia. The comet is the blue-ish object towards the middle of the picture, with its tail seen streaking backwards. Mars is the bright sun-like object in the middle, overexposed to reveal the comet

The HiRise camera on the MRO acquired images of this comet from a minimum distance of about 86,000 miles (138,000 kilometers), yielding a scale of about 453 feet (138 meters) per pixel.

Another image taken by Nick Howes using the Tzec Muan Observatory in Australia reveals the comet and its tail as it approaches Mars.

The amazing picture sees Mars look almost as bright as the sun as the image had to be overexposed in order to reveal the comet.

'We'd planned our observations for weeks in advance, scripting telescope code and setting up observation plans,' Mr Howes told MailOnline.

'We shot hundreds of images of the comet and Mars with different exposure times, and had some technical challenges to overcome, but we're delighted with the end result, which was part of a global collaboration with both professional and amateur observers.

'Tzec Muan is an educational outreach observatory, so this is great motivation also for the students'

Comet C/2013 A1, also known as Siding Spring, passed within about 87,000 miles (140,000 km) of Mars, equivalent to about one-third of the distance between Earth and our moon.

Nasa confirmed yesterday that all three of its Mars orbiters survived the event unscathed, while Esa and India's spacecraft were also unaffected.