It is being tracked under the correct designation “2018-017A”, therefore they are deleting an erroneous report that was temporarily assigned the designation that was deleted. What makes you think they “stopped tracking” it?
That says nothing about whether or not they continued tracking the object as “not an asteroid”.
> 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 seems like something that's worth fixing as more and more artificial objects get launched into deep space.
Then other countries can use this as an excuse to not go public with their spacecraft ephemerides (US didn't tell the world about all of their spacecrafts, so why should I do that?)
In that case they figured out what it was when a spectrograph of the surface light showed it was - painted! Hah.
Good they caught it now, though I figured all the paint has long been eaten away by UV rays.
Nevertheless, great to see they're working on it now!