Newly discovered asteroid Tesla Roadster launched into space
Elon Musk’s humor is out of this world.
Astronomers at the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts confused it with an asteroid earlier this month, seven years after the SpaceX CEO launched the Tesla Roadster into orbit.
A day after astronomers at the Minor Planet Center recorded 2018 CN41, it was canceled on Jan. 3 when Musk declared it a pathologist.
The center said on its website that after the deregistration of 2018 CN41, it “suggested that the orbit matches that of a man-made object, 2018-017A, Falcon Heavy Upper stage with Tesla Roadster. The designation of 2018 CN41 is being delisted and will be listed as skipped.”
Garbage from a spaceship starship in the sky
Astronomers at the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts confused it with an asteroid earlier this month, seven years after the SpaceX CEO launched the Tesla Roadster into orbit. (SpaceX via Getty Images)
SpaceX launched the Tesla Roadster on the maiden flight of SpaceX’s massive Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018.
The Roadster was expected to go into an elliptical orbit around the Sun, passing Mars and returning to Earth, but apparently it went beyond the orbit of Mars and continued on its way to the asteroid belt, Field said at the time.
SpaceX launched the Tesla Roadster on the maiden flight of SpaceX’s massive Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
When the roadster was named an asteroid earlier this month, it was less than 150,000 miles from Earth, which is closer than the moon’s orbit, Astronomy magazine reported, meaning astronomers will want to track how close it gets to Earth.
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Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics (CFA), told Astronomy Magazine that the error reflects a problem with unobserved objects.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched his first personal car into orbit at the time. (Justin Sullivan)
“The worst thing is, you spend a billion to launch a space probe to study an asteroid and when you get there you only realize it’s not an asteroid,” he said.
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