The Minor Planet Center announced in January that an amateur astronomer discovered a new asteroid. However, the MPC deleted the object from its registry less than a day later. The reason? It was a Tesla Roadster, the same one that SpaceX launched into orbit in 2018. Between the growing fleet of communications satellites and the planned commercial space stations, space is becoming increasingly crowded and humanity is losing track of what we’re dumping up there.
Peter Veres, an MPC astronomer, explained to Smithsonian Magazine that the amateur from Turkey cross-referenced a catalog of artificial satellites and sat_id, a third-party software. However, the red Roadster didn’t appear in the database and was orbiting the Sun, so it was assumed to be an asteroid. It’s not surprising that the first production car in orbit slipped through the cracks because the MPC registry has added newly discovered 588 near-Earth objects so far this year.
The Tesla Roadster was a dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first test in 2018. The car launched into space was Musk’s personal roadster, a suggestion that he fielded from Twitter. A mannequin in a SpaceX spacesuit was put in the driver’s seat dubbed “Starman” and the sound system was set to blare David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” adding to the cringy joke. It’s a much larger object than what appeared in images and videos. The car isn’t free-floating in orbit but is permanently fixed to the upper stage of a Falcon Heavy rocket.
SpaceX hasn’t changed in the slightest
The amateur was concerned that he mistook an interplanetary Mars mission for an asteroid but couldn’t find anything. The mistakenly identified car, designated 2018 CN41, immediately caught the attention of other astronomers because of how close it gets to Earth. The object gets within 150,000 miles of our little blue marble, closer than the Moon. It’s not inconceivable that it could enter the atmosphere at some point in the distant future. However, the object was linked to the Tesla stunt by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics. With his identity hidden, the amateur told Astronomy
“Being slightly embarrassed that I might have caused unnecessary excitement (it WAS quite a low MOID), I quickly went to MPC’s help desk and let them know the NEO I just submitted was a rocket stage.”
Less than 17 hours later, the MPC issued a deletion notice for 2018 CN41. SpaceX hasn’t become a more serious operation in the seven years since the debut test flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket. Starship, the company’s successor rocket, exploded twice in consecutive launches this year. The resulting failures showered the Caribbean in debris. It would be easy to assume that SpaceX would face some sort of financial or legal penalty, but the company continues to rake in billions of dollars from the federal government. It’s totally based on merit and not Elon Musk’s bankrolling of President Trump’s election campaign.
