Astronomers briefly thought Elon Musk’s car was an asteroid. Here’s why that points to a broader problem
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Seven years after SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s cherry red sports car into orbit around our sun, astronomers unwittingly began paying attention to its movements once again.
Observers spotted and correctly identified the vehicle as it started its extraterrestrial excursion in February 2018 — after it had blasted off into space during the Falcon Heavy rocket’s splashy maiden launch. But more recently, the car spawned a high-profile case of mistaken identity as space observers mistook it for an asteroid.
Several observations of the vehicle, gathered by sweeping surveys of the night sky, were inadvertently stashed away in a database meant for miscellaneous and unknown objects, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
An amateur astronomer noticed a string of data points in January that appeared to fit together, describing the orbit of a relatively small object that was swooping between the orbital paths of Earth and Mars.
The citizen scientist assumed the mystery object was an undocumented asteroid and promptly sent his findings to the MPC, which operates at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a clearinghouse that seeks to catalog all known asteroids, comets and other small celestial bodies. An astronomer there verified the finding.
And thus, the Minor Planet Center logged a new object, asteroid “2018 CN41.”
Within 24 hours, however, the center retracted the designation.
The person who originally flagged the object realized their own error, MPC astronomer Peter Veres told CNN, noticing that they had, in fact, found several uncorrelated observations of Musk’s car. And the center’s systems hadn’t caught the error.
Feb 12, 2025
