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Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster
(www.astronomy.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2025
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Astronomy
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He’s fucking things up in space, even.
Not really here, this would have been a dummy weight either way since it was the test payload for Falcon Heavy. So *something *was going to be sent up. The Tesla specifically was a publicity stunt, but a similar weight was going into a similar orbit.
The bigger question is why they lost tracking on it in the first place to where they weren't sure what it was. This wasn't from any sort of failure, this was a planned and fully successful launch payload into a planned orbit.
Tracking doesn't necessarily have to be lost for this kind of thing to happen. The Rosetta spacecraft was accidentally given a provisional asteroid designation in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)#Deep_space_manoeuvres