Astronomers delete asteroid because it turned out to be Tesla Roadster

I'm not sure if it was the lack of trajectories or the unusual orbit which caused the automation issue at MPC.

> 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.

That says nothing about whether or not they continued tracking the object as “not an asteroid”.

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.

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

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.

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

You underestimate the difficulty of navigating lawsuits and access to common infrastructure. Look how difficult it was for Google to lay fiber in the few cities they have, they have been stopped in their tracks over and over because of lawsuits filed by their competitors (ATT etc).

Also fiber providers have very little incentive to build out fiber to rural customers. Why trench hundreds of miles just to hook up a few dozen people?

Starlink has the advantage of serving ALL rural customers with the same set of satellites. It’s actually very efficient when you think about how many millions of rural people are served by a common set of satellites.

I know this first hand because I would not have internet without Starlink and it has been a godsend. Before Starlink my whole neighborhood was SOL because it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench out to us.

The result will be confusion, arguing, zero sum game thinking.

Yes, fibre optic is faster, yes it's cheaper. Yes I have it in my home. Yes I'm your friend. We are the same, we are all in the same boat. There are special uses for Starlink too. It can help countries where inneficient/corrupt governments/telcos create monopolies and don't want to provide fibre. Starlink will force all telcos to be at either faster or cheaper than Starlink. Healthy competition will make everything better. I will still use my FTTH 1Gbps fibre optic which is 3 times cheaper than Starlink at my own house. But I have a Starlink antenna as a backup, once a camion ripped the fibre optic cable (hanging from poles in my neighborhood) and I would have been 1 month without connection if it wasn't for Starlink. I use Starlink at the summer houses of my families, in the long run it's cheaper than paying DSL for 12 months since you can cancel Starlink whenever we can. We are all on the same boat, this beautiful planet called Earth, let's preserve it, but also, let's keep building awesome stuff, there is no limit to awesomeness.

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.