It’s an Asteroid … It’s a Comet … No — It’s a Car!
On January 2, 2025, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not far from my Harvard office, announced a new asteroid labeled 2018 CN41. The orbital parameters included a semimajor axis that is 32.5% larger than the Earth-Sun separation and a modest eccentricity of 0.256, providing it an orbital period of 1.53 years. The Minor Planet Center is designated by the International Astronomical Union to serve as the authority handling reports on the orbits of new asteroids, comets, and other small bodies in the Solar system.
2018 CN41 was discovered by the amateur astronomer H. A. Guler as a Near Earth Object (NEO) since it arrived within 240,000 kilometers from Earth, less than two thirds of the distance to the Moon. However, over less than 17 hours, the Minor Planet Center issued an editorial notice on the deletion of 2018 CN41 from its database since the object was not an asteroid. There was no evidence for a cometary tail around it either.
If 2018 CN41 is not an asteroid nor a comet, what is it? As it turns out, it is a car. Specifically, it is the Tesla Roadster car, launched on February 6, 2018, as the dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy first flight. This car is now orbiting the Sun on the eccentric orbit reported for 2018 CN41
While objects in lower Earth orbits are tracked by the U.S. Space Command, deeper space is largely not monitored.
The European Space Agency plans to launch in 2029 a robotic spacecraft named Comet Interceptor. The spacecraft will stay at the second Earth-Sun Lagrange Point L2, near the locations of the WMAP satellite or the Webb telescope, and wait several years for a near Earth comet to fly by at a reachable trajectory and speed. Given the mission cost of 150 million Euros, the operators must be careful not to target artificial space debris by mistake.
In 2007, the Minor Planet Center published an editorial notice deleting the asteroid designation for 2007 VN84 when this object was discovered to be the Rosetta spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency on March 2, 2004. Between 2020–2022, four spacecraft were added to the asteroid database and quickly deleted, including the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission, NASA’s Lucy mission, the Spektr-RG X-ray observatory, and the Centaur upper rocket stage for the 1966 Surveyor 2 lunar probe.
What lies in the future of the car 2018 CN41? Theoretical calculations of its future trajectory indicate that the Tesla Roadster car might collide with Earth within a few tens of millions of years. If confusion arises again, astronomers might argue that this future meteor is a rock of a type never seen before. This was indeed suggested for the nature of the anomalous interstellar object, `Oumuamua, after its discovery on October 19, 2017. It is now considered by comet experts as one example for a new class of “dark comets”.
Three years after the discovery of `Oumuamua, on September 17, 2020, another anomalous object was discovered by the same Pan STARRS survey telescope in Hawaii. Initially thought to be an asteroid and labeled 2020 SO, this second anomalous object was eventually identified as the Centaur upper stage used on September 20, 1966 to launch the Surveyor 2 spacecraft. Similarly to `Oumuamua, 2020 SO showed non-gravitational acceleration consistent with an outward push from solar radiation pressure on its orbit. Today, it would have been initially cataloged as a “dark comet.” The spectrum of 2020 SO was eventually observed by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in December 2020 and showed features consistent with stainless steel. Following the confirmation of the artificial origin of 2020 SO, the object was removed from the Minor Planet Center’s database on February 19, 2021. This database still lists ‘Oumuamua as a dark comet, whereas the possibility of it being artificial from an extraterrestrial origin is discarded as speculative.
In a News Nation interview last night, I was asked whether I believe that technological artifacts could be landing in our oceans as interstellar meteors. Indeed, under my leadership, the Galileo Project is planning to search for large pieces of material through the wreckage of interstellar meteors. I explained: “We must keep in mind the possibility that Elon Musk may not be the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky-Way since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
