The other day it became known about the erroneous identification of cosmic garbage, which was mistaken for a near -Earth asteroid. This has already happened, but the conclusions have not yet been made. Companies and agencies carefully monitor missiles and satellites while they fulfill their mission and forget about them after their failure. By mistakenly accepting cosmic garbage for asteroid, you can without the benefit of waste scientific and financial resources that are not endless.
Image source: Spacex
The 2018 CN41 object fell into an official list of asteroids coming close to the ground in early January this year. It is assumed that the record was made with the filing of an amateur astronomer from Turkey, who made an opening according to archival data. In less than a day, the center of small planets of the International Astronomical Union (MPC), which is conducting asteroid registers, issued an editorial notification that refutes the discovery.
The 2018 CN41 object turned out to be the former Tesla Roadster, Ilon Musk, which SpaceX sent to space and advertising purposes in 2018 during the first launch of the Falcon Heavy missile. Then the carman “Starman” (Starman) in the spacesuit and to the music of the album of David Bowie “Space Oddity” was sent to the car were put behind the wheel of the car was sent towards Mars.
Contrary to expectations, the symbolic envoy did not reach the orbit of the Red Planet and continued to move, going into orbit around the Sun, where he would periodically get closer to the ground and Mars. Apparently, this is not the last case, to put it mildly, an irresponsible attitude to the outdated or out of order of payload. This will lead to an increase in the frequency of false identification of asteroids and, which cannot be ruled out, to expensive errors. You can spend a billion dollars on the preparation of a space mission to study a near -Earth asteroid and only when convergening it to find out that this is a mountain of garbage from the Earth, scientists warn.