On Monday, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft telescope was mistaken for an asteroid!
The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre (MPC) in Massachusetts is in charge of keeping tabs on tiny floating space rocks. Monday morning, MPC posted a description of an asteroid named 2015 HP116. The asteroid had also been spotted by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii last week, according to New Scientist.
Gareth Williams, who posted the sighting, then later retracted the finding, had initially thought that the object would remain in the Earth-moon system from October 2014 and March 2019 - meaning, the Earth would have two moons. (Our very own Tatooine-esqe world!)
Space is littered with all kinds of junk, so MPC has to filter out pieces of old satellites and rocket boosters when they search. "For some reason, it didn't show up in the checks," Williams said, according to New Scientist.
This has happened before. In 2007, Earthlings were warned of a near-miss with an object called 2007 VN84 - which turned out to be ESA's Rosetta spacecraft on a fly-by getting prepped for its 2014 date with Comet 67P.
To read about what kind of threat near-Earth objects really pose and what we need to prepare, check out HNGN's exclusive interview with John L. Remo, an astrophysicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
