Happy New Year 2025

Tag: asteroid

Newly discovered asteroid turns out to be Tesla Roadster launched into space

Elon Musk’s sense of humor is out of this world.

Seven years after the SpaceX CEO launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit, astronomers from the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts confused it with an asteroid earlier this month.

A day after the astronomers with the Minor Planet Center registered 2018 CN41, it was deleted on Jan. 3 when they revealed that it was in fact Musk’s roadster.

The center said on its website that 2018 CN41’s registry was deleted after “it was pointed out the orbit matches an artificial object, 2018-017A, Falcon Heavy Upper stage with the Tesla Roadster. The designation2018 CN41 is being deleted and will be listed as omitted.”

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Seven years after the SpaceX CEO launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit, astronomers from the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts confused it with an asteroid earlier this month. (SpaceX via Getty Images)

SpaceX launched the Tesla Roadster on the maiden flight of SpaceX’s huge Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018.

The roadster was expected to go into elliptical orbit around the sun, going a little beyond Mars and back toward Earth, but it apparently exceeded the orbit of Mars and kept going to the asteroid belt, according to Musk at the time.

SpaceX launched the Tesla Roadster on the maiden flight of SpaceX’s huge Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images))

When the roadster was mistaken for an asteroid earlier this month, it was less than 150,000 miles from Earth, which is closer than the moon’s orbit, according to Astronomy Magazine, meaning that astronomers would want to monitor how close it gets to Earth.

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Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Astronomy magazine that the mistake shows the issues with untracked objects.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched his former personal car into orbit at the time. (Justin Sullivan)

“Worst case, you spend a billion launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it’s not an asteroid when you get there,” he said.

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Fox News Digital has reached out to SpaceX for comment.

January 25, 2025
Stadium-sized asteroid will pass relatively close to Earth, NASA says

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is monitoring a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that is moving past Earth on Tuesday.

NASA told Fox News Digital that the rocky object, which has been named 2024 ON, is 350 meters long by 180 meters wide, which roughly equals 1,150 feet by 590 feet – larger than previous estimates.

NASA has deemed the asteroid “stadium-sized” and reported it was 621,000 miles away from Earth on Tuesday morning, which is considered relatively close. Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Fox News Digital that an asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth only happens every five to ten years.

Farnocchia, who works at the laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said that the last time a large meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere was in Russia in 2013. Earth has not been hit by a meteor of 2024 ON’s size since prehistoric times.

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NASA announced that a stadium-sized asteroid would be passing “relatively close” to Earth on Tuesday. (iStock)

Although the asteroid is close enough to Earth to be deemed a “potentially hazardous object,” Farnocchia said there is no chance the asteroid will hit Earth. The asteroid would need to be within a couple of hundred miles to be a concern.

“We actually check [about the possibility of collision], not just for the immediate future, but also for the next hundred years,” the engineer explained. “And there is no possibility of collision in the next hundred years.”

The asteroid is one of five that will pass by Earth over the next two days, but the other rocky objects will not come nearly as close as 2024 ON. The four asteroids will be between 1.1 to 3.9 million miles away from Earth, and three of the asteroids measure roughly 51 feet in diameter, which is the size of a house.

2024 ON will be 621,000 miles from Earth on Tuesday night, NASA says. (NASA)

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One of the asteroids, named 2013 FW13, measures around 510 feet in diameter and will pass by Earth on Wednesday.

NASA’s Asteroid Watch Dashboard tracks “asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth.” According to a data table, 2024 ON was traveling at around 8.8 kilometers per second on Tuesday morning, which is nearly 20,000 miles per hour.

“The dashboard displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter,” the organization’s website explains.

NASA announced that a stadium-sized asteroid would be passing “relatively close” to Earth on Tuesday. (iStock)

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“The dashboard displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.”

Andrea Vacchiano is a breaking news writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. Readers can send story tips to [email protected].

January 23, 2025
Earth bids farewell to ‘mini moon’ asteroid set for return visit in 2055
- Planet Earth is bidding farewell to a “mini moon,” a harmless asteroid named 2024 PT5, which has been trailing Earth for two months and will leave on Monday, drawn away by the sun’s stronger gravitational pull.
- First spotted in August, the asteroid began its brief gravitational interaction with Earth in late September.
- After its departure, the asteroid is not expected to return near Earth until 2055.
Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a “mini moon” for the past two months.

The harmless space rock will peel away on Monday, overcome by the stronger tug of the sun’s gravity. But it will zip closer for a quick visit in January.

NASA will use a radar antenna to observe the 33-foot asteroid then. That should deepen scientists’ understanding of the object known as 2024 PT5, quite possibly a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid.

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While not technically a moon — NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth’s gravity and fully in orbit — it’s “an interesting object” worthy of study.

A supermoon with a partial lunar eclipse rises over Lake Michigan in Chicago, on Sept. 17, 2024. Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a “mini moon” for the past two months. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)

The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid’s “mini moon behavior,” Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands for hundreds of observations so far.

Currently more than 2 million miles away, the object is too small and faint to see without a powerful telescope. It will pass as close as 1.1 million miles of Earth in January, maintaining a safe distance before it zooms farther into the solar system while orbiting the sun, not to return until 2055. That’s almost five times farther than the moon.

The NASA logo is displayed at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, on June 21, 2023. (STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

First spotted in August, the asteroid began its semi jog around Earth in late September, after coming under the grips of Earth’s gravity and following a horseshoe-shaped path.

By the time it returns next year, it will be moving too fast — more than double its speed from September — to hang around, said Raul de la Fuente Marcos.

The Waning Gibbous moon is seen on June 8, 2023, in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

NASA will track the asteroid for more than a week in January using the Goldstone solar system radar antenna in California’s Mojave Desert, part of the Deep Space Network.

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Current data suggest that during its 2055 visit, the sun-circling asteroid will once again make a temporary and partial lap around Earth.
January 23, 2025