Elon Musk's Tesla Spotlights Call for Transparency in Operating Craft in Deep Space

While objects in low Earth orbits are tracked by the U.S. Space Force, deeper space remains an unregulated frontier.

Mark Zastrow

Thursday, January 23, 2025 at 12:29 PM ET

Verified

Edited By: tccjeremy

That’s no asteroid. That’s … a car? [Credit: SpaceX]

Key Takeaways:

The Minor Planet Center initially identified an object, 2018 CN41, as an unusual near-Earth asteroid, only to retract the designation within 17 hours after it was discovered to be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster.
This mistaken identity highlights a growing problem of numerous deep-space artificial objects (spacecraft, rocket stages) being misidentified as asteroids due to a critical lack of centralized tracking and public trajectory data.
The lack of transparency from nations and companies operating craft beyond Earth's orbit leads to wasted astronomical observation efforts, potential misallocation of resources, and hinders crucial efforts to identify genuine hazardous near-Earth asteroids.
Astronomical organizations advocate for a central public repository of deep-space artificial object trajectories, urging operators to publicly report and update their craft's paths to prevent such misidentifications and protect scientific endeavors.

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On January 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by citizen scientist H. A. Güler, the object’s orbit was notable: It came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 kilometers) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO)—one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth.

But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an editorial notice: It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid.