Interesting 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.
Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
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Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#52Interesting 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.
>The disk contains the Foundation Trilogy by Arthur C. Clarke.
You mean Asimov?
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If only there were some sort of article explaining the need for transparency between organizations regarding these things.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#54> 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.
They might just be normal quotes.
Yes, it's a journalistic quote meant to scare, not quotation marks meant to express irony.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is being tracked under the correct designation “2018-017A”, therefore they are deleting an erroneous report that was temporarily assigned the designation that was deleted. What makes you think they “stopped tracking” it?
The headline says "delete" not "correct" or "replace". Blame clickbait.
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Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is being tracked under the correct designation “2018-017A”, therefore they are deleting an erroneous report that was temporarily assigned the designation that was deleted. What makes you think they “stopped tracking” it?
The headline says "delete" not "correct" or "replace". Blame clickbait.
Neither of your suggestions are accurate. The headline is accurate.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I 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, o…
Ooh, 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.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK. But it seems like something is amiss if this error keeps being made. Why didn't the reporting astronomer, or anyone who presumably checked the submission, find the 2018-017A object when searching for it in their database?
Because their software, sat_id can only search Earth-orbiting satellites: > Payne noted that when the Tesla Roadster was originally launched in 2018, the community caught it and flagged it as an artificial object, and the MPC “correctly labeled it as such without assigning a minor planet designation.” But when subsequent observations were archived by the MPC and later identified by G., sat_id failed to locate the Roa…
In some of the other cases listed in the article such as 1966-084B (2020 SO) the position was unknown until they found it and as such no central database could have helped them, but it's unclear why Horizons would not help with the Roadster given they could query it with the observed position.
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#59I'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...
Honestly "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).
Re: Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
There’s not a lot of man made objects floating in deep space. DeltaV to get outside earths gravity well is just extremely high.
There'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_...