The discovery of a new asteroid this month has turned out to be Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster launched by SpaceX in 2018.

Less than 24 hours after the Minor Planet Center announced a new asteroid, it said the object was actually Musk's electric car launched into space as payload on a rocket.

Musk's car was accidentally and briefly classified as an asteroid in 2025. The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center issued a bulletin on Jan. 2 announcing 2018 CN41 as a newly discovered near-Earth object.

At the beginning of the year, scientists at the Minor Planet Center at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, logged the discovery of an asteroid identified by an amateur astronomer. Within a day,

In 2018, during the launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, Elon Musk sent a Tesla Roadster into space, which later led to some confusion.

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),