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Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#12That 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.
It's tracked as debris and not an asteroid.
It was deleted because it's already tracked
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#13Seems 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?
It's being tracked, but not by the "Minor Planet Center".
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#14[flagged]
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#15I'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-r...
> 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.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#16There's an entire belt of them in orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#17That 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.
It's tracked as debris and not an asteroid. It was deleted because it's already tracked
So 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.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#18Seems 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?
too late, deleted forever
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#19Yet another case of astronomer entitlement. You don't own the universe, astronomers.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's tracked as debris and not an asteroid. It was deleted because it's already tracked
So 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.
Quick! Someone write the Falsehoods Programmers Make About Space article.