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Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
- perihelions 2y agoI'm not sure I buy into the sensationalism behind this story. We're tracking billions[0] of asteroids in interplanetary space, and you say that it's a data-processing hazard that the half-dozen or so deep-space anthropogenic objects aren't submitted to a mandatory international database for de-confliction? That doesn't pass the smell test. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-rubin-observatory-telescope-cosmos-universe-space-digital-camera/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-r...
- schiffern 2y agoI think the issue is that there isn't such a "mandatory international database for de-confliction."
- philipwhiuk 2y agoThis is not the first time it has happened and often they are mistakenly classified as NEOs. https://x.com/planet4589/status/1638916566644576259 https://x.com/planet4589/status/1638916566644576259
- tbrownaw 2y ago> mistakenly classified as NEOs. Is it not an Object that approaches to Near the Earth?
- GMoromisato 2y agoThat's not how definitions work. The IAU defines what "NEO" means and it excludes artificial objects: https://www.iau.org/public/themes/neo/ https://www.iau.org/public/themes/neo/ You may complain that you should be able to derive the definition from the name, but then all names would be as long as their definition, defeating the purpose.
- teruakohatu 2y ago> I'm not sure I buy into the sensationalism behind this story It does seem odd there is an entire article about a single mislabeled-and-then-caught object in a large database that probably has many mislabeled objects that have never been caught. The position of the object is well documented [1] [2]. It surprises me that there are not some very basic checks done on new objects against other databases. All that said, I do feel for astronomers, the crazy tempo of rocket launches and satellites makes their job a lot harder and its only going to get harder still but maybe offset by Super Heavy enabling larger and cheaper space telescopes. [1] https://theskylive.com/roadster-info https://theskylive.com/roadster-info [2] https://where-is-tesla-roadster.space/live https://where-is-tesla-roadster.space/live
- Retric 2y agoThere’s not a lot of man made objects floating in deep space. DeltaV to get outside earths gravity well is just extremely high.
- LiamPowell 2y agoThere's at least 72 according to [1], which does not include upper stages from unmanned missions. You could likely query all of them that have been found from Horizons, but I don't know how to do so off the top of my head. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_heliocentric_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_...
- grajaganDev 2y ago>I'm not sure I buy into the sensationalism behind this story. Agreed - Elon gets clicks especially given his recent "involvement" with the US government.
- vkou 2y agoWhen you, as a lobbyist and supplier, are getting an office built for you in the white house, that's a little bit closer than being 'involved'.
- simne 2y ago> We're tracking billions[0] of asteroids This is exaggeration. Really, this type of astronomy is very underfunded, so we're just approach state, when will track just most dangerous objects, which number is just about thousand, just because of budget limitation.
- fastball 2y agoHonestly "astronomers" have really started to annoy me, which surprises me because I love space and astronomy and star-gazing and such. I have bought multiple personal telescopes over the years, so I guess I even qualify as an amateur astronomer. But lately it seems I disagree with astronomers on any intersection of astronomy and politics. I put "astronomers" in quotes because of course I realize that "not all astronomers", but the consensus does seem to be there. > Satellite internet constellations that provide affordable internet to millions of people bad because it might hurt terrrestrial astronomy. > Infrastructure projects should not be built in sites that are good for astronomy because astronomy is apparently more important than energy and resource production[1]. > Much ado about nothing because some amateur astronomers thought a Tesla Roadster was an asteroid. Implications that companies are irresonsible / direlict in their duty for not ensuring that astronomers are well-informed. Just overall I've been getting the feeling over the last couple years that "astronomers" have a severely inflated sense of self-importance. Or maybe I am the problem and I am under-valuing astronomy (or over-valuing everything else). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42668953
- kanbara 2y agoit’s cheaper and more permanent to just lay fibre and copper to provide internet. we don’t need 3000 satellites launched every few years to do so. i think you’re overinflating elon’s importance. (not that he designs and builds starlink, anyway)
- lazide 2y agoPermanent yes. But cheaper? A lot of the places served (as in actual customers) by starlink are in truly remote and difficult to reach places. I know someone who uses it in the middle of private land surrounded by national forest, 5+ miles from the nearest paved road. It doesn’t get electricity, and the last quote he was able to get was for $250k+ to attempt to run power from the local utility. But now with Solar…. And he’s not the only one in that region. Using starlink for dense urban environments? Yeah that makes no sense. It also possibly doesn’t make any sense in suburban environments either. But dispersed or remote areas? Pretty awesome. LTE is sometimes a competitor in those situations, but there are a lot of people in those environments that don’t have good line of sight to a cell, but do get plenty of open sky, and Starlink is far superior for them than any other solution. LTE over these remote areas is also a major capex, and involves a lot of environmental impact. Hughes/Geo satellite sucks in both latency and bandwidth. Most LTE data plans are also expensive for this type of thing, as any RV’er will tell you. In many ways, this solves the ‘everyone must live in the big city to make good money’ problem, if coupled with remote work.
- nwallin 2y agoThere are only a little over a million known asteroids. The link you provided is saying that the Vera Rubin Observatory is expected to find billions of galaxies, and says nothing about how many asteroids it is expected to find. https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/faq/how-many-asteroids-are-there https://catalina.lpl.arizona.edu/faq/how-many-asteroids-are-...
- readthenotes1 2y agoRemember the hope? https://youtu.be/rpO1U-nEgRU?feature=shared https://youtu.be/rpO1U-nEgRU?feature=shared
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- throwawaymaths 2y agoisn't this a good thing? it sets an exciting lower bound on the effectiveness of citizen science detection efforts, and a confirmation that the techniques are sound
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoYour perspective would've made for a much better article.
- hidroto 2y agoI would think that the albedo of the tesla is much higher than the typical asteroid, making it much easier to track.
- Reason077 2y agoSeems like an odd move to just delete it. Is it any less worthy of being tracked because it's man made? Wouldn't adding it to the database at least reduce the chance of the same mistake being made again by other astronomers? Isn't this, like other space junk in such orbits, effectively an "anthropogenic asteroid"? Why not just add them in with a special tag or naming convention to indicate that they're man-made?
- lima 2y agoIt's being tracked, but not by the "Minor Planet Center".
- dmurray 2y agoHopefully it still is being tracked by them, otherwise when someone reports it tomorrow they'll have no idea what it is and will need to go through this song and dance again. It's just not being published on a certain curated list by the MPC.
- Thorrez 2y agoBy who? They say there doesn't exist a database tracking things like this: >“This incident, along with previous NEOCP postings of the WMAP spacecraft, highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects,” the MPC fumed when it retracted 2007 VN84. “A single source for information on all distant artificial objects would be very desirable.”
- lima 2y agoThe ID they use is from a US government database: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2018-017A https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... I'm not sure if it was the lack of trajectories or the unusual orbit which caused the automation issue at MPC.
- yapyap 2y agotoo late, deleted forever
- userbinator 2y agoThat headline reads like something from The Onion. More seriously, if they are tracking objects orbiting near the earth, I think the origin of them shouldn't matter.
- Demlmlm 2y agoIt's tracked as debris and not an asteroid. It was deleted because it's already tracked
- heironimus 2y agoSo the takeaway I get is that these two databases should be cross linked so this doesn’t happen again. Maybe there’s a community of software developers who could help.
- RandomBacon 2y agoQuick! Someone write the Falsehoods Programmers Make About Space article.
- dentemple 2y agoIf only there were some sort of article explaining the need for transparency between organizations regarding these things.
- codeflo 2y agoThat would be great. Instead, we got an article vaguely demanding "transparency" for "untracked" objects, when the motivating example for the article is an object that was actually very well tracked and was launched with millions of witnesses live on stream.
- minetest2048 2y agoThis: https://compasse.aas.org/aas-releases-a-compasse-led-statement-on-transparency-in-cislunar-and-interplanetary-spaceflight-activities/ https://compasse.aas.org/aas-releases-a-compasse-led-stateme...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- galacticaactual 2y ago[flagged]
- dgacmu 2y agoThere is almost nothing in the article that is "rocket man bad." The article is "lack of global coordination about man made objects in deep space bad." Which seems kinda like a reasonable and slightly boring complaint except that it's funny in this case because it was a drifting car.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoThere are signs > At the time, it received a great deal of notoriety No, it had received a lot of excitement and enthusiasm, or at best people said it was a gimmick / stunt. Where is the "notoriety" coming from?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- grajaganDev 2y agoThe article is free advertising for Elon and Tesla. Elon launched the thing as a publicity stunt and this article amplifies it.
- andrewstuart 2y agoThere's an entire belt of them in orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
- pfdietz 2y agoYet another case of astronomer entitlement. You don't own the universe, astronomers.
- 867-5309 2y agoyeah, everyone knows that belongs to the astrophysicists /dash/
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIn the same way biologies don't own santient species, yes. Someoems gotta classify this stuff, though.
- throw310822 2y ago> announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41 Can someone explain why in 2025 they discover an asteroid which gets designated as "2018" and then they delete it when it turns out that it was an object launched in space precisely in 2018?
- namrog84 2y agohttps://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/ https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming/ It's initially given a temporary name prior to the now official name. 2018 CN41 Means it's the 41st object identified in the first half of February in 2018. A is first half of jan. B is 2nd half. Etc.. then the iteration in that section
- crusty 2y agoI think the question is, how does the 41st object to be discovered in 2018 get that name in 2025? Clearly there's a missing link to this, as in some guy in a field "finds" an object, submits it, it gets added, it gets identified, it gets removed, and it's actual designation is then used in write-ups as if that name were the one in use before it was identified as not being an object discovered in 2025. For accuracy, or should say 2025 CN2 (or whatever), aka 2018 CN41, was removed from the database.
- wbl 2y agoI'm not an expert but my understanding is it takes multiple observations to pin down an orbit and be sure it isn't an existing object. Those observations can be very chance driven.
- spenczar5 2y agoOoh, I know this one! I worked on historical asteroid observations categorization and precovery for a few years. The MPC has many observations of unidentified moving object candidates. These are called “tracklets” and come from pairs of observations of the same patch of the sky by the same observatory, separated (typically) by a few minutes. The “isolated tracklet file”, or ITF, is a catalog of all of these unidentified moving objects. When an identification is made and submitted to the MPC, the MPC back-projects the orbit and checks the ITF for any past observations which might have actually been of this newly identified object. Then, the designation’s timestamp is of the first matching observation. So in this case the ITF had an observation from back in 2018. Occasionally, two “objects” turn out to be the same actual physical object, but we learn late. In this case, the MPC does maintain a list of “aliases” of the object, so you might get that “aka” list. But that is not quite what happened here.
- indus 2y agoI read the headline incorrectly as hard delete But looks they just soft deleted the entry in their database.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoWould have been interesting if we did just throw a satellite at it to deflect it's course. Then I remembered we're still probably decades from being able to do such things on demand.
- romaaeterna 2y ago> Deep space is “largely unregulated,” McDowell told a special-session audience Jan. 14 at the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. “There’s no requirement to file some kind of public flight plan, no equivalent of the TLEs or the corporate data that we get for low-orbit satellites.” This will be one of my favorite regulatory journalistic scare-quotes going forward.
- titanomachy 2y agoThey might just be normal quotes.
- romaaeterna 2y agoYes, it's a journalistic quote meant to scare, not quotation marks meant to express irony.
- travisjungroth 2y agoThose aren’t scare quotes. That’s just a quote.
- netman21 2y agoInteresting fact: University of Southhampton developed 5D disks for dense data storage. The capability was acquired by the Arch Foundation which seeks to preserve data longterm. They donated one of the first 5D disks to Elon Musk who placed it in the red Tesla that he sent into Solar orbit on the first Falcon Heavy booster. The disk contains the Foundation Trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke.
- aeve890 2y ago>The disk contains the Foundation Trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke. You mean Asimov?
- GeoAtreides 2y ago>After launch on the Falcon-Heavy rocket, it orbited Earth for six hours, until a third burn of the stage two inserted the Tesla Roadster into an interplanetary solar orbit reaching out toward the asteroid belt and having a perihelion of 0.99 AU and an aphelion of ~1.7 AU. This orbit will be stable for several million years. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2018-017A https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id...
- floppiplopp 2y agoThat space garbage is still a wonderful advertisement for the deposit on the next roadster. Also, there's almost certainly a corpse in the trunk.
- gni 2y ago[dead]
- mannykannot 2y agoI think it would have been cool for SpaceX to put a teapot in the roadster's trunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
- nancyminusone 2y agoMaybe they did. You can't prove that they didn't!
- giorgioz 2y agoahah thank you for letting me discover Russel's Teapot. As a Pastafarian priest I will add a teapot to my rituals while I venerate the Flying Spaghetti Monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
- markdjacobsen 2y agoOn a related note, a science fiction short story anthology titled "Derelict" was published in 2021. When they were soliciting stories, I thought long and hard about how to put a creative twist on the topic. I wrote a story about a race to recover Elon's roadster, which made it into the anthology. Free story: https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.markdjacobsen/Celestial+Object+143205.pdf https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.markdjacobsen/Celesti... Full anthology: https://www.amazon.com/Derelict-Campbell-Jack/dp/1940709407/ https://www.amazon.com/Derelict-Campbell-Jack/dp/1940709407/