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 (MPC) mistakenly identified Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, launched into deep space in 2018, as a new near-Earth asteroid before quickly retracting the designation.
This incident highlights a growing concern among astronomers regarding the lack of transparency and tracking for artificial objects (like spacecraft and rocket stages) in deep space, unlike those in lower Earth orbit.
Astronomers warn that untracked deep-space objects lead to wasted observation efforts, potential misidentification of asteroids, and could hinder planetary defense or scientific missions.
There is a strong call from the astronomical community for a centralized, public repository of deep-space object trajectories, regularly updated by national and private space agencies, to address this issue.

See a mistake? Contact us.

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.