Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk’s cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver “Starman.”
The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.
On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.
The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car’s driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and “listening” to David Bowie’s album “Space Oddity” on loop.
The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth’s gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian “biothreat” if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.
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The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.
However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.
Mistaken identity
This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, NASA’s Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.
This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.
These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. “Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it’s not an asteroid when you get there,” he said.
While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in 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 transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects,” members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.
