A small telescope on Mauna Loa captured images Thursday of a Tesla Roadster cruising the cosmos.
A small telescope on Mauna Loa captured images Thursday of a Tesla Roadster cruising the cosmos.
The car was blasted into space Tuesday on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX and Tesla are owned by Elon Musk.
The University of Hawaii telescope is known as ATLAS, or the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. As its name suggests, its purpose is to search for asteroids heading toward Earth.
A twin telescope is located on Haleakala.
UH said ATLAS wasn’t searching for the Roadster but found it during routine observations. It appeared as a small dot moving against a backdrop of stars.
Too bad Steve dearing wasn’t in it…..
Lol. Why don’t we get a pix of the cute care floating out there, they just tell us about it.
All the debacles about taking over a mountain to build observatories. For what? For looking at a car in space. Take the car to the Moon and do some doughnuts and lay some burnout marks there so astronomers can observe it from Hawai‘i. Then put that in the news. Yeah right they weren’t searching for it. Unless the car is predicted to fall from the sky.