Elon Musk’s Telsa Roadster was mistaken for an asteroid. Here’s why

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Veres said he wrote code that aims to better scan for human-made objects that may slip through the Minor Planet Center’s filters by cross-checking with the NASA Horizons database. Right now, Chodas estimates there are about 100 human-made objects in orbit around the sun, and “most of are lost because they’re not tracked much,” he said. “Now, when we find this mythical asteroid that’s purely platinum and is worth $1 trillion in actual material — am I going to tell the world which one it is?” Gialich said, “Probably not.” Clouding the skies The president of the American Astronomical Society, Dara Norman, published a letter in September calling for better transparency among space operators. “If we’re confused about whether something is an unknown asteroid or a Tesla Roadster, then it starts to cost us money to do things like tracking it or figuring it out.” That’s why better coordination and transparency are crucial, Norman said, so that scientists can efficiently do their jobs — tracking potentially hazardous asteroids and attempting to gain a fuller picture of the objects that populate our solar system.