Less than 24 hours after the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of a new asteroid, they said it was actually Musk's car.

The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., officially registered the new space rock Jan. 2, saying it was spotted hurling through the final frontier roughly 150,000 miles from Earth, according

Musk launched his personal Tesla Roadster into space on February 6, 2018, as a test payload for the Falcon Heavy rocket.

The newly discovered asteroid, named 2018 CN41, turned out to be a Tesla launched into space by SpaceX in 2018.

Without central repository for artificial objects, it'll only get worse Scientists mistook Elon Musk's Tesla roadster for an asteroid in a debacle that highlights the problem of tracking near-Earth objects.

A strange object recently spotted orbiting Earth has been identified as a Tesla Roadster. Initially classified as asteroid "2018 CN41" by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) on January 2, 2025, the object was discovered by an amateur astronomer based in Turkey.

A brand new mysterious 'asteroid' is causing confusion after it was spotted and submitted by an amateur astronomer, before being designated 2018 CN41. It was less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) away from Planet Earth which qualifies it as a near-Earth object (NEO),