Earlier this month, an amateur astronomer stumbled upon what appeared to be a newly discovered near-Earth object (NEO). The “asteroid,” designated 2018 CN41, came alarmingly close to Earth — closer than the Moon’s orbit. This sparked quite a bit of concern as this NEO risked colliding with our planet. Yet, within 17 hours of its announcement, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) swiftly retracted its findings.

The “asteroid” wasn’t a space rock after all. It was a cherry-red Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk launched into space to much fanfare in 2018  as part of a publicity stunt during the maiden flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The car, complete with a mannequin named “Starman” in the driver’s seat, had been orbiting the Sun ever since.

The car’s purpose was to serve as an unconventional test payload. At the time, Musk quipped that it was “something fun” to send into space instead of the typical block of concrete. The Roadster has now resurfaced, back into the limelight. Yet, while this case of mistaken identity is harmless, it points to a broader problem of orbital regulation that could fester to dangerous proportions unless something is done about it.

A Cosmic Case of Mistaken Identity

The discovery of 2018 CN41 began with an amateur astronomer in Turkey, who asked to be identified only as “G.” Using software he developed to sift through the MPC’s public archive of observations, G identified several candidate objects that could be traced through multiple telescope images. One of them was 2018 CN41.

“I was ecstatic and submitted the identification,” G told Astronomy. The MPC accepted the submission and notified the astronomical community. But as G plotted the object’s orbit in 3D, he began to have doubts. The trajectory resembled that of a spacecraft traveling to Mars, not a natural asteroid.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, soon confirmed G’s suspicions. McDowell connected the object’s trajectory to the Falcon Heavy launch. Embarrassed yet relieved, G informed the MPC, leading to the retraction of the asteroid designation.

This wasn’t the first time a human-made object had been mistaken for an asteroid. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), the Rosetta spacecraft, and the BepiColombo mission to Mercury have all been misidentified as asteroids in the past.

A Growing Concern for Space Tracking

While this mix-up may elicit a chuckle, it also reveals a troubling issue: the growing presence of untracked artificial objects in deep space. Unlike satellites in low Earth orbit, which are carefully monitored to prevent collisions, spacecraft and debris beyond these regions basically don’t have to follow any rules. That was understandable until recently given the negligible amount of human-made debris and the vastness of space, but things are changing and they’re changing fast.

There were 259 orbital launch attempts in 2024, a 17% increase from the previous record of 221 orbital launch attempts in 2023, based on SpaceNews analysis of open source records. For comparison, in 2010, there were only 74 orbital launch attempts.

“Deep space is largely unregulated,” McDowell noted at the recent American Astronomical Society meeting. Without a requirement for public trajectory data, objects like Musk’s Tesla can easily be mistaken for asteroids.

Untracked objects could lead to wasted observing effort, skewed statistical analyses of asteroid threats, and even costly mistakes. “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,” McDowell said.

The problem is set to worsen as more missions venture to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In response, astronomers are calling for a centralized database to track artificial objects in deep space.

“A single source for information on all distant artificial objects would be very desirable,” the MPC said.

Citizen Science and the Future of Discovery

Despite the mix-up, the incident underscores the vital role of amateur astronomers in modern science. G, who has co-discovered two named asteroids through citizen science projects, remains optimistic.

“I’m still sort of disappointed it wasn’t a NEO, but it was an interesting experience to say the least,” he told Astronomy. “At the very least, we managed to filter out some non-minor-planet observations from the MPC database.”

As for the Tesla Roadster, it continues its lonely journey through the cosmos. Each time the car comes close to Earth, it will get a gravitational kick that will send it into a wider or narrower orbit — but where to and for how long? Physicists at the University of Toronto Scarborough actually crunched the numbers in 2018, finding that the Tesla Roadster should collide with Earth or Venus over the next million years with a probability of 6 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. In all likelihood, however, the vehicle won’t last that long.

According to Tom Narita, an astrophysicist at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, the Roadster could be obliterated by high-speed space dust and cosmic ray radiation. In only a couple of years, all the plastic and rubber in the car should be shredded by radiation while the metal structure can last hundreds of thousands of years.