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Astronomers have been left red - faced after announcing the discovery of a newfangled near - ground asteroid — only to understand that the supposed space rock was the remains ofElon Musk ’s cherry red - flushed Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit - tog driver " Starman . "
The misidentified aim , which was found into space on board aSpaceXrocket in 2018 , highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors , investigator say .
An amateur astronomer submitted evidence of a new near-Earth asteroid that turned out to be the Tesla Roadster that SpaceX launched into space in 2018.
On Jan. 2 , the International Astronomical Union ’s Minor Planet Center ( MPC)added a Modern object , dubbed 2018 CN41 , to its list of near - ground asteroid . The supposed space rock was identified by an nameless amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of in public available information , Astronomy.com describe . However , just 17 hours later , the MPC released aneditorial noticeretracting the find after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake .
The Tesla Roadster , which was antecedently used by Elon Musk , was launched into infinite on Feb. 6 , 2018 , as the test lading for themaiden launching of SpaceX ’s Falcon Heavy rocket . The packaging stunt garnered far-flung attention at the prison term , partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car ’s tug rear end that waswearing a likely faulty spacesuitand " listening " to David Bowie ’s album " Space Oddity " on loop .
The car and its driver headed toward Mars afterescaping Earth ’s gravityand were imagine to enter a unchanging orbit around the Red Planet , which raised alarum at the sentence that itcould become a likely Martian " biothreat"if it incidentally crash - bring down there . However , the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sunlight . Now , it circles the sun andoccasionally soar up past Mars .
The Tesla Roadster and its “driver” Starman were the payload of SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket launch.
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The Tesla has now fill out roughly 4.5 trips around the sun , jaunt at roughly 45,000 miles per hour ( 72,000 km / h ) , according towhereisroadster.com . This means that the car has now surpass its initial 36,000 - international mile warranty around 100,00 time .
However , the auto isprobably unrecognizable nowafter being exposed to year of intense radiotherapy from the sunlight and bombarded by flyspeck fragments of space rocks , which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman .
Mistaken identity
This is not the first prison term that homo - made objects have been mistaken for near - world asteroids . The MPC has temporarily listed a figure of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two ten — include theEuropean Space Agency ’s Rosetta space vehicle , NASA ’s Lucy probe , the joint European - JapaneseBepiColombo missionand others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris , according to Astronomy.com .
This eccentric of confusedness will also likely increase as more human - made objects are launched into blank space .
These misidentifications could go to more false alarms for near - Earth asteroids , which could in turn ensue in costly error , Jonathan McDowell , an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , order Astronomy.com . " Worst pillow slip [ scenario ] , you spend a billion [ dollars ] launching a blank probe to analyse an asteroid and only realize it ’s not an asteroid when you get there , " he articulate .
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While space agencies and secret companies are need to accurately track their products in cranial orbit around Earth , there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth ’s gravity , like the Tesla Roadster .
However , " such transparence is essential for promoting space situational awareness , reduce interference between missions , [ and ] void interference with observations of innate objective , " members of the American Astronomical Society monish in a2024 program line .
