9mo ago

Astronomers just deleted an asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster

www.astronomy.com

An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster

21 comments

He’s fucking things up in space, even.
- his stupid fucking internet satellites make planning getting things into orbit real hard. also it's not even his tesla in space. he stole it from mark eberhart
  
  And his 6,000+ starlink pieces of trash in orbit have made earth based telescopes worse. They get in the way of the shot, and the emissions are something like 10x worse than promised.
  Him and that tetraethyl lead guy. Just absolute stains.
  Edit: no its 32 times the noise. It's a known issue, and it's been happening since the beginning.
- Not really here, this would have been a dummy weight either way since it was the test payload for Falcon Heavy. So *something *was going to be sent up. The Tesla specifically was a publicity stunt, but a similar weight was going into a similar orbit.
  The bigger question is why they lost tracking on it in the first place to where they weren't sure what it was. This wasn't from any sort of failure, this was a planned and fully successful launch payload into a planned orbit.
  
  Tracking doesn't necessarily have to be lost for this kind of thing to happen. The Rosetta spacecraft was accidentally given a provisional asteroid designation in 2007.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(spacecraft)#Deep_space_manoeuvres
Fuck Musk. But also, this is a nothingburger -- there are plenty of spent upper stages floating around the solar system.
- This entire thread is filled with people that know absolutely nothing about Space but the basics modern "media" poorly conveys, but feel the need to comment and display their ignorance proudly just because they hate Musk. It's quite sad actually for an actual Astronomy community, there's worse discussion in here than reddit.
- As a KSP player I can confirm this
Things would be going much better if he was behind the wheel of that car.
Can we please fine him a few billion dollars for intentionally littering in space?
- Better fine the US government or NASA for all the Saturn V upper stages that are floating around up there as well. Nearly every Saturn V third stage was sent into an orbit around the sun after the Lunar injection maneuver, they're all still up there. In fact, they lose track of those and "rediscover" them all the time because. The three-body problem is not fully solvable with our current technology, and the further out you get from initial conditions the less accurate calculations become.
  
  I mean, I'm very okay with that too. 😁
It'd be so funny if Kessler Syndrome was started by a car accident.
There oughtta be a sci-fi short story competition using this for a basis - what happens when aliens eventually come across this bizarre piece of junk in space?
Yay more space garbage. Just what we needed!
- It's in orbit around the Sun.

21 comments