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.

Researchers have admitted to mistakenly identifying Elon Musk's car as a near-Earth asteroid, highlighting the importance accurate space tracking.

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

Earlier this month, the Minor Planet Center announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid close to Earth. Turns out, it was a car.

Mr Tusk denounced the words as "all too familiar and ominous", and his tourism minister, Sławomir Nitras, has gone even further and called for Polish citizens - around 6 million of whom died in the Holocaust - to launch a boycott of Tesla vehicles in response.

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

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.