Risky mix-up: Tesla's space roadster passes for an asteroid

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This mix-up could have had serious consequences: What an amateur astronomer reported as an asteroid and was initially classified as such by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, turned out to be something entirely different. It turned out to be the Tesla Roadster launched into space by Elon Musk in 2018. Other objects have also been mistaken for asteroids. An expert from the CfA sees these incidents as a major problem.

On January 2, the CfA reported the discovery of an unusual asteroid, as reported by the news portal Astronomy.com. It was named 2018 CN41 and had been discovered by an amateur astronomer. And it had an explosive trajectory: less than 240,000 kilometers lay between the star and Earth, which is significantly less than the approximate distance between Earth and the Moon (around 384,000 kilometers). This means that 2018 CN41 counted as a so-called Near Earth Object, which means that a collision with the Earth cannot be ruled out.

Asteroid was a Tesla

But 17 hours later, everything changed: the institute deleted its records of the object because it turned out that it was not an asteroid at all – but a car. More precisely, a Tesla Roadster, which the aerospace company SpaceX launched into space as a test load with the first model of the Falcon Heavy rocket in 2018, and which has been orbiting the sun ever since. The unusual combination came about because both SpaceX and Tesla are owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

In this case, the mix-up was quickly cleared up, but some see incidents like this as a growing problem: the lack of overview of spacecraft operated by states and private companies in space beyond low Earth orbits. The latter are closely monitored by the US Space Force, for example, which is why such a mix-up would hardly be possible here.

Lack of overview in space

But beyond this range, the growing number of untracked objects could become an issue by hindering protection against potentially dangerous asteroids, believes astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell from the CfA.

Objects like the space Tesla could lead to unnecessary observation efforts and – if they are numerous enough – could even distort statistical analyses of potential dangers from near-Earth asteroids, McDowell writes in an email to Astronomy.

Problem could get worse

"The worst-case scenario is that you spend a billion to launch a spacecraft to investigate an asteroid, only to discover on arrival that it's not an asteroid," he explains. And this problem will only get worse as more nations and companies venture to the moon and beyond.

The Minor Planet Center (MPC), which is also based at the CfA, is recognized worldwide for processing reports of observed asteroids, comets and other small bodies in the solar system.

Not an isolated case

In addition to Teslas on a space course, it has also found spacecraft and discarded rocket stages as supposed asteroids. In the 2000s, NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was traveling in deep space around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, made it onto the MPC's public list of near-Earth objects several times, the confirmation of which is still pending.

In 2007, the MPC had to withdraw the asteroid designation 2007 VN84 when it turned out that the object was the Rosetta space probe, a European mission that undertook a flyby of Earth to make the first landing on a comet.

The current incident and previous incidents highlight the poor availability of data on artificial objects in deep space, McDowell points out. "A single source of information on all these distant artificial objects would be highly desirable".

(nen)