Amateur astronomer mistakes Musk’s Roadster for an asteroid, sparking a brief space scare

An amateur Turkish astronomer briefly mistook SpaceX’s 2018 Tesla Roadster for a newly discovered near-Earth asteroid, triggering a short-lived scare until astrophysicist Peter Veres explained it was an artificial satellite in a long heliocentric orbit; the Roadster remains far from Earth and poses no immediate danger, continuing its orbit around the Sun with only a very long-term chance of collision.