Space is full of debris, between asteroids and other matter that is floating around it can be hard to determine objects when they are far away. But most large objects in space are somewhat trackable, as they tend to orbit around a larger body, but the thing that no one expected astronomers to find in space is a car, and not just any car, but a Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space in 2018.
So, what happened is a common thing, astronomers at the Minor Planet Center (MPC), which is part of the International Astronomical Union, were looking at space fulfilling their main task, which is keeping an eye on space rocks and make sure nothing is headed straight for Earth. This job is very important as it warns us of any large meteorites that could make impact with Earth and cause a problem. These objects are called near-Earth objects, or NEOs and most of them are located and tracked yearly but this year there was an unknown object that made everyone lose their cool.
On January 2nd, 2025, the MPC made what they thought was another routine discovery, they logged a new object orbiting within 150,000 miles of Earth, gave it the official name “asteroid 2018 CN41,” and sent out a bulletin to the public like they usually do. But within a day, they realized that the mysterious “asteroid” was not a space rock at all, it was a car.
Identifying asteroids in space, a hard job that requires vision
SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket back in 2018 to prove that they could make it Mars’ orbit. In it, they managed to cram a lot of useless things, on purpose, as a proof of concept, and one of them was Elon Musk’s own Tesla Roadster with a mannequin named Starman behind the wheel. Seven years later the car is still floating around in space, following its own orbit and path.
While the experiment seemed funny at the time, especially since it proved SpaceX’s capabilities, the results are not as fun, as we are now left with a car in space that we have no way of getting down. After the misidentification, the MPC quickly pulled the asteroid listing from their system, but this highlighted a bigger problem, if even professional astronomers are misidentifying space objects like this, what does that say about our ability to monitor more dangerous objects?
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from the Center for Astrophysics, is unimpressed by the amount of debirs that we are sending up into space “If left unchecked… the growing number of untracked objects could hinder efforts to protect Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids. They could lead to wasted observing effort and — if sufficiently numerous — even throw off statistical analyses of the threat posted by near-Earth 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.”
Even the MPC itself addressed the issue, saying “This incident… highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects. A single source for information on all distant artificial objects would be very desirable.”
This dream for a better centralized system to track man-made objects that are in space may not be as easy to make a reality, as may countries and companies have sent satellites and probes without informing anyone else for their own purposes. And while this is no longer a secret due to technology, it would still require admissions from certain countries that they are not willing to publicly make. Having said that, after this incident, it might be just a matter of time before the list is unofficially started.