January 28, 2025 On January 2, 2025, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, not far from my Harvard office, announced a new asteroid labeled 2018 CN41. The orbital parameters included a semimajor axis 32.5% larger than the Earth-Sun separation and a modest eccentricity of 0.256, providing an orbital period of 1.53 years. The International Astronomical Union designates the Minor Planet Center to serve as the authority handling reports on the orbits of new asteroids, comets, and other small bodies in the Solar system. 2018 CN41 was discovered by amateur astronomer H. A. Guler as a near-Earth Object (NEO) because it arrived within 240,000 kilometers of Earth, less than two-thirds of the distance to the Moon. However, in less than 17 hours, the Minor Planet Center issued an editorial notice deleting 2018 CN41 from its database because the object was not an asteroid, and there was no evidence of a cometary tail around it. But if 2018 CN41 is not an asteroid or a comet, then what is it? As it turns out, it is a car. Specifically, it is the Tesla Roadster car, launched on February 6, 2018, as the dummy payload for the Falcon Heavy first flight. This car is now orbiting the Sun on the eccentric orbit reported for 2018 CN41 While the U.S. Space Command tracks objects in lower Earth orbits, it does not monitor objects in deeper space. The European Space Agency plans to launch in 2029 a robotic spacecraft named Comet Interceptor. The spacecraft will stay at the second Earth-Sun Lagrange Point L2, near the locations of the WMAP satellite or the Webb telescope, and wait several years for a near-Earth comet to fly by at a reachable trajectory and speed. Given the mission cost of 150 million Euros, the operators must be careful not to accidentally target artificial space debris. In 2007, the Minor Planet Center published an editorial notice deleting the asteroid designation for 2007 VN84 when this object was discovered as the Rosetta spacecraft, launched by the European Space Agency on March 2, 2004. Between 2020 and 2022, four spacecraft were added to the asteroid database and quickly deleted, including the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission, NASA’s Lucy mission, the Spektr-RG X-ray observatory, and the Centaur upper rocket stage for the 1966 Surveyor 2 lunar probe. What lies in the future of the car 2018 CN41? Theoretical calculations of its future trajectory indicate that the Tesla Roadster car might collide with Earth within a few tens of millions of years. If confusion arises again, astronomers might argue that this future meteor is a rock of a type never seen before. This was indeed suggested for the nature of the anomalous interstellar object, `Oumuamua, after its discovery on October 19, 2017. Comet experts now consider it one example of a new class of “dark comets.” Three years after the discovery of Oumuamua, on September 17, 2020, the same Pan STARRS survey telescope in Hawaii discovered another anomalous object. Initially thought to be an asteroid and labeled 2020 SO, this second anomalous object was eventually identified as the Centaur upper stage used on September 20, 1966, to launch the Surveyor 2 spacecraft. Similarly to `Oumuamua, 2020 SO showed non-gravitational acceleration consistent with an outward push from solar radiation pressure on its orbit. Today, it would have been initially cataloged as a “dark comet.” The spectrum of 2020 SO was eventually observed by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in December 2020 and showed features consistent with stainless steel. Following confirming the artificial origin of 2020 SO, the object was removed from the Minor Planet Center’s database on February 19, 2021. This database still lists ‘Oumuamua as a dark comet, whereas the possibility of it being artificial from an extraterrestrial origin is discarded as speculative. See Also