News writer On January 2, the Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of the unique asteroid 2018 CN41, but soon had to remove the object from the official list—for the simple reason that it turned out to be a Tesla Roadster car, launched into orbit back in 2018. The report on the “mysterious asteroid” noted that the object approached Earth at a distance of 240,000 km and was classified as a near-Earth object (NEO)—meaning it needed to be monitored, considering its future potential to “crash” into the planet. Meanwhile, 17 hours after publication, the text was edited with a message about the mistaken identification, as the object being observed turned out to be Elon Musk’s “space” car. Let us remind you that in February 2018, SpaceX, for an experiment, added Tesla Roadster as a payload to the Falcon Heavy rocket and at that time it gained great popularity as the first serial car sent to space along with a mannequin in the driver’s seat, named Starman. However, such experiments now cause great concern among astronomers, as they can lead to wasteful expenditures of money and time, as well as interfere with the monitoring and efforts to protect Earth from potentially hazardous asteroids. This case also raises questions again about the lack of transparency and regulation in deep space: while objects in lower near-Earth orbits are tracked by the US Space Force, the deeper space remains largely an unmanaged frontier. “In the worst case, you spend a billion to launch a space probe to study an asteroid and realize it’s not an asteroid only when you get there,” said Center for Astrophysics (CfA) specialist Jonathan McDowell in a comment to Astronomy. The Minor Planet Center operates under the aegis of the International Astronomical Union and is a globally recognized organization that processes observations and forms reports about new asteroids, comets, and other small bodies in the Solar System. However, incidents where the organization mistakenly identifies objects are becoming more frequent year by year: in the 2000s, the NASA WMAP probe, designed to study cosmic microwave background radiation, several times appeared on the center’s page in the list of near-Earth objects, and in 2007 the ESA spacecraft “Rosetta” was labeled an asteroid when it flew by Earth to make the first-ever landing on a comet. During 2020-2022, at least four spacecraft were added to the Minor Planet Center’s list of asteroids—and quickly removed. Among them are the European-Japanese mission BepiColombo (on its way to Mercury), NASA’s Lucy mission (heading to the Trojan asteroids orbiting Jupiter), the X-ray observatory Spektr-RG, and what is considered the upper part of the Centaur rocket.