January 2, 2025. The insignificant planetary center at the Harvard-Smith Center for Astrophysics received a message from an amateur astronomer. In this, he notes that he noticed what seems to be rare Asteroid is very close to the groundThe field after consideration of the information of astrophysia of this institution launched a notification at 23:52 UTC. Nevertheless, only after 17 hours they publish a message that cancel the previous notification. In fact, what they saw was not an asteroid, but Elon Musk Tesla Rogster.
SpaceX Director General launched this car into space in 2018, on board rockets The falcon is heavy. The goal was just to conduct a test with this rocket, carrying a heavy useful load on board. This load was not more or no less than Tesla Roadster, which Musk himself led until then. There was a car on board the rocket, and inside this mannequin, which they baptized like Starman
The launch was successful, and since then Tesla Roadster Debue for space without supervision. Therefore, when amateurs and professional astronomers discovered an unidentified object in orbit close to Earth, They could not connect this with SpaceX. There were no records of his position, so that was the last thing he went through their heads. This may seem like a funny story, but in fact, many scientists warn that this is a touch of attention to many things that are done incorrectly in space.
This is not an asteroid, this is not a plane, this is the relatives of Tesla Elon Musk
The object discovered on January 2 was 240,000 kilometers from the ground. It is even closer than the orbit of the moon. Therefore, scientists Harvard soon cataloged him as The object is close to the ground (Neo for his abbreviation in English). These objects should be subjected to constant supervision from the risk of dangerous shock from our planet.
In this case, it was during this monitoring that it was found that in fact it was the Tesla roadster. But what would happen if it really was an asteroid?
Scientists who devote themselves to the monitoring of Neos have warned the risk of something like what happened. If there are no records of the whereabouts of objects launched by a person into space, they can be confused with Neos. In this case Unnecessary monitoring protocolThis would be cancel the resources from the control of possible objects that are dangerous, and that in order to devote the focus of the important, they have not yet been discovered.
In addition, as explained Astronomy magazine Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, From the Center for Astrophysics (CFA), in the worst case, billions of dollars can be spent on launching a probe aimed at studying a suspicious object. These would be unnecessary expenses, and, for a lot of money available to space agencies, this is still Spend in vain.
This is not the first time
What happened to Tesla Rooster was more striking, because it was a car of a millionaire with a place on board. Pretty strange.
But the fact is that this is not the first time that something like this happens. At least four ships are mistakenly recorded as asteroids, and then ultimately denied. This happened to the missionary ship Bepi-ColomboFrom Europe and Japan, with mission Lucy NASA, with the Russian observatory X -Ray Spektr-RG And with whom it is believed that this is the upper stage of the rocket that promoted the moon probe Inspector-2 In 1966.
These missions, at least, had a task. Bepi-Colombo is responsible for the study of Mercury, Lucy addresses the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter, Spektr is looking for new galaxies and active galactic nuclei, and Surveyor 2 launched to study the moon. Nevertheless, Tesla Roadster is an experiment on a millionaire tycoon to demonstrate how far he can go with his money. This news is very good, but we should not stop paying attention to the important.
Source: Hiper Textual
