The discovery of a new asteroid this month has turned out to be anything but. In fact, it isn't even a natural object.
The wannabe asteroid, announced on Jan. 2 as 2018 CN41, is actually a Tesla Roadster launched into space years ago by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The company sent the car (with a spacesuit-clad mannequin called "Starman" in the driver's seat) into a long orbit around the sun in 2018 as the first payload of the company's Falcon Heavy rocket.
At the time, the SpaceX Tesla launch (for it was, indeed, Musk's personal Roadster) was a flashy flight. But that renown didn't prevent a case of mistaken identity seven years later, when an astronomer reported a sighting of the object as an asteroid. On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts — which tracks such finds — announced the discovery. A day later, once the Tesla truth was clear, the center retracted the claim. "The designation 2018 CN41 is being deleted and will be listed as omitted," the center wrote on Jan. 3.
"The Tesla case is not an isolated case," astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian center, told Space.com in an interview. "It's something that happens quite often."
NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), launched in 2001, has been misidentified as an asteroid on more than one occasion, McDowell said. The probe studied the universe in microwaves through 2010, and did so from a location 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a stable point in space called Lagrange Point 2. It was only when it fired its thrusters to move around when astronomers realized it wasn't an asteroid.
"That's when people would go, 'Huh, asteroids don't normally maneuver,'" McDowell said.
The Tesla and WMAP are just two in an ongoing series of asteroid detection turnabouts, caused by what scientists see as a lack of transparency in spacecraft operations from commercial and government providers. In September 2024, that concern prompted the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to issue a statement calling for clarity in tracking spacecraft and spent rocket stages in orbit, as well as for interplanetary or cis-lunar operations near the moon.
"Such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, avoiding interference with observations of natural objects, including observations of potentially hazardous asteroids, and ensuring the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies," officials with the AAS's Committee for the Protection of Astronomy and the Space Environment (COMPASSE) wrote in the statement at the time.
McDowell, who worked on the study as part of COMPASSE's subcommittee on space debris, said the problem may get worse in the years ahead.
More and more commercial companies and government agencies are launching satellites and missions into orbit and deep space. In 2024, SpaceX alone shattered records by launching 134 Falcon rocket missions. That's more than some countries fly annually.
On Earth, aviation and maritime officials have systems in place to track planes and vessels as they travel around the planet. That's not the case for space, but it should be, McDowell and AAS officials believe.
"If you have to file a flight plan for a local flight on Earth, you should have to file a flight plan for an interplanetary flight," McDowell said.
The lack of such a system can lead to more misidentifications of human-built spacecraft by astronomers, and such confusion could have lasting impacts. Elon Musk's Tesla, for example, was initially thought to be a near-Earth asteroid that would approach within just under 150,000 miles (241,000 kilometers) of Earth at its closest point, which is close enough to be catalogued for safety tracking. More cases like that can impact astronomers' search for potentially dangerous asteroids.
McDowell said a database such as NASA's Horizons System, operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a good example of a potential centralized tracking system for satellites, defunct spacecraft and rocket stages. The system already has tracking data for "1,436,743 asteroids, 3,992 comets, 293 planetary satellites [including satellites of Earth and dwarf planet Pluto], 8 planets, the sun" and select spacecraft, according to a NASA description.
"The worst case scenario is you spend a billion dollars spending sending a spacecraft to an asteroid, and it turns out not to be an asteroid," McDowell told Space.com. "That would be so embarrassing."
That's an admittedly extreme and unlikely example, McDowell added, but it illustrates the point.
Take, for example, the case of AstroForge, a commercial company that aims to mine near-Earth asteroids. In February, the company will launch a spacecraft called Odin to its target asteroid, but initially kept the name of that target secret from the public, ostensibly to prevent competing mining companies from swooping in. Odin will launch alongside the private IM-2 moon lander built by Intuitive Machines on Feb. 26, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
That secrecy sparked concern among astronomer like McDowell over how to prevent future scientists from inadvertently classifying AstroForge spacecraft as asteroids if the company would not share where its probes were in the solar system.
On Jan. 29, AstroForge finally unveiled its target asteroid as 2022 OB5, an M-type asteroid about 328 feet (100 meters) across, according to SpaceNews. AstroForge CEO Matt Gialich told SpaceNews that by revealing the asteroid now, ahead of the launch, amateur astronomers may be able to observe the target and share more details about the space rock, a potential boon for AstroForge.
"That's a huge victory for spaceflight transparency," McDowell said.
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