There’s nothing like ringing in the new year with the discovery of a shiny new asteroid only to find out it’s a big hunk of space trash. That’s what happened to the Minor Planet Center at Harvard and object 2018 CN41, originally thought to be an asteroid less than 150,000 miles from Earth.
The distance caught the attention of astronomers, who noted that the 2018 CN41 might one day come crashing into our planet. In the end, they had nothing to fear: 2018 CN41 wasn’t an asteroid, but rather the forgotten trash of one of the richest men on Earth.
2018 CN41. The mistaken asteroid was discovered by an amateur Turkish astronomer in the Minor Planet Center’s public archive of observations of objects, Astronomy reported. The center’s archive allows anyone to search for asteroids and other objects. If they believe they found something, they can submit it to the Minor Planet Center for review.
The center accepted the astronomer’s submission and published the discovery in an electronic circular on Jan. 2. The excitement over the discovery didn’t last long, though. The amateur Turkish astronomer explained that he began to have doubts once he saw the object’s trajectory plotted in 3D on the Minor Planet Center’s website.
Notably, the orbit’s orbit resembled one of a spacecraft traveling to Mars. Astronomer Jonathan McDowell quickly figured out that 2018 CN41 was actually the upper stage of the Falcon Heavy rocket carrying Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster. Two days later, the Minor Planet Center announced it would delete the object.
History of Roadster launch. Musk made history by launching his personal cherry-red Tesla Roadster into space in 2018. The billionaire’s car didn’t make the journey alone. It was accompanied by a mannequin in a spacesuit named “Starman” as well as a sign that said “Don’t Panic” on the dashboard, a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The car served as a test payload for the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first mission, which it completed successfully.
No centralized database for space junk. How could someone confuse a famous Tesla Roadster in space with a new asteroid? While it’s a valid question, it’s actually a lot harder to keep track of all the trash we send into space than you might think.
This is because there’s no centralized database of space junk. Furthermore, although spacecraft and satellites closer to Earth are tracked and monitored by different agencies, the same thing doesn’t occur for objects in deep space. According to Astronomy, private industry is not in the habit of disclosing the trajectories of the objects they send into deep space.
“There’s no requirement to file some kind of public flight plan, no equivalent of the TLEs or the corporate data that we get for low-orbit satellites,” McDowell said at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Not the first time. This isn’t the first time the Minor Planet Center has mistaken rocket stages and spacecraft for asteroids. Four spacecraft were mistakenly classified as asteroids between 2020 and 2022, including Europe and Japan’s joint BepiColombo mission and NASA’s Lucy mission.
The cost of untracked objects. Although this may seem like a funny anecdote—I admit it, I laughed—it highlights the holes and flaws in our space reporting systems that could have important consequences in the future. McDowell points out that the growing number of untracked objects could impact astronomers’ efforts to track potentially dangerous asteroids.
“Worst case, you spend a billion launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it’s not an asteroid when you get there,” he said.
Images | SpaceX
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