Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster

Agreed, if the title were "Astronomers reclassified asteroid..." there's barely any reason to click on it.

Neither of your suggestions are accurate. The headline is accurate.

Because their software, sat_id can only search Earth-orbiting satellites:

> Payne noted that when the Tesla Roadster was originally launched in 2018, the community caught it and flagged it as an artificial object, and the MPC “correctly labeled it as such without assigning a minor planet designation.”

But when subsequent observations were archived by the MPC and later identified by G., sat_id failed to locate the Roadster, said Payne. And the object was not caught upon further review because unlike most satellites, it orbits the Sun and not Earth. In addition, it is an unusual Sun-centric orbit for a spacecraft. Because it was a test flight for the Falcon Heavy, there was no destination in particular; that is why its trajectory originates near Earth but overshoots Mars’ orbit, as G. noted.

As the article mentioned, there is no such thing as space-track.org or celestrak.org where anyone can get trajectories for all deep space spacecraft. The closest thing we have is JPL Horizons, so they're working with them:

> Payne agreed that a central repository, “regularly updated by national and private space agencies, would significantly enhance the identification process.” Currently, he said, the MPC is collaborating with JPL on a system to better detect artificial objects that aren’t in Earth orbit and filter them out of the MPC’s observational database.

There's at least 72 according to [1], which does not include upper stages from unmanned missions. You could likely query all of them that have been found from Horizons, but I don't know how to do so off the top of my head.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_in_...

That's not how definitions work. The IAU defines what "NEO" means and it excludes artificial objects: https://www.iau.org/public/themes/neo/

You may complain that you should be able to derive the definition from the name, but then all names would be as long as their definition, defeating the purpose.

Apparently we do, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bunch of people for whom satellite internet is the only option.

Not to mention the difficulty of running fiber or copper to ships and airplanes.

Permanent yes. But cheaper?

A lot of the places served (as in actual customers) by starlink are in truly remote and difficult to reach places.

I know someone who uses it in the middle of private land surrounded by national forest, 5+ miles from the nearest paved road.

It doesn’t get electricity, and the last quote he was able to get was for $250k+ to attempt to run power from the local utility. But now with Solar….

And he’s not the only one in that region.

Using starlink for dense urban environments? Yeah that makes no sense. It also possibly doesn’t make any sense in suburban environments either.

But dispersed or remote areas? Pretty awesome.

LTE is sometimes a competitor in those situations, but there are a lot of people in those environments that don’t have good line of sight to a cell, but do get plenty of open sky, and Starlink is far superior for them than any other solution.

LTE over these remote areas is also a major capex, and involves a lot of environmental impact.

Hughes/Geo satellite sucks in both latency and bandwidth.

Most LTE data plans are also expensive for this type of thing, as any RV’er will tell you.

In many ways, this solves the ‘everyone must live in the big city to make good money’ problem, if coupled with remote work.

Where did I mention Elon Musk?

Ooh, I know this one! I worked on historical asteroid observations categorization and precovery for a few years.

The MPC has many observations of unidentified moving object candidates. These are called “tracklets” and come from pairs of observations of the same patch of the sky by the same observatory, separated (typically) by a few minutes.

The “isolated tracklet file”, or ITF, is a catalog of all of these unidentified moving objects.

When an identification is made and submitted to the MPC, the MPC back-projects the orbit and checks the ITF for any past observations which might have actually been of this newly identified object.

Then, the designation’s timestamp is of the first matching observation. So in this case the ITF had an observation from back in 2018.

Occasionally, two “objects” turn out to be the same actual physical object, but we learn late. In this case, the MPC does maintain a list of “aliases” of the object, so you might get that “aka” list. But that is not quite what happened here.

I'm not an expert but my understanding is it takes multiple observations to pin down an orbit and be sure it isn't an existing object. Those observations can be very chance driven.

Quick! Someone write the Falsehoods Programmers Make About Space article.

If only there were some sort of article explaining the need for transparency between organizations regarding these things.