Astronomers jumped into action, trying to make sense of it all and talking it out together on social media. The numbers provided, they quickly realized, didn’t exactly match up with the orbit pictured.

“We collectively assumed that the numbers on Musk’s tweet were based on telemetry, and that they’d know best,” says Andy Rivkin, a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who studies asteroids.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been live-tweeting his attempts to discern the correct orbit, tweeted Wednesday, “Elon is still talking about the Starman going to the asteroid belt,” referring to the nickname Musk gave the dummy driver in a nod to David Bowie. “But I’m not convinced yet ...”

Musk’s plot provides numbers for two kinds of points in the orbit of the Tesla: aphelion, the car’s farthest distance from the sun, and perihelion, its closest distance to the sun. Astronomers like Rivkin, McDowell, and others (and probably anyone else less afraid of math than I am) take the average of these two figures and use that to calculate the orbit period of the Tesla.

But because the numbers here seemed off, Rivkin says he and others turned to independent observations made by Rob McNaught, an Australian asteroid observer, which were posted online. Late Wednesday night, their suspicions were confirmed. Revised orbital data provided by SpaceX and shared with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s system for tracking solar-system bodies showed the original graphic was incorrect.

So, based on the corrected numbers, the car actually won’t make it as far as the asteroid belt, as Musk claimed in his tweet.

No asteroid visit for the Starman after all *sad trombone* https://t.co/3NCk4yivdI — Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) February 8, 2018

According to the revised data, Rivkin says, it will take the Tesla about 18.8 months to complete one trip around the sun. This means that the car will reach its farthest distance from Earth in about half that time. The Tesla will cross the orbit of Mars twice per orbit, so Musk is still fulfilling his wish to send his Tesla “to” Mars—it’ll just take a little longer between visits.

The new numbers suggest the payload reached a speed of 33.5 kilometers per second after the last push, which Rivkin says is about 2.5 percent more speed than SpaceX would have needed to keep the Tesla from going no farther than the orbit of Mars.

“I have no idea whether that’s because they wanted some margin, or things were more efficient than they were expecting, or what,” Rivkin says. “If this were a real Mars mission, this would be a disastrously wrong orbit and might not be recoverable. But since this may have been ‘put it up to full throttle and let’s see what this baby can do,’ it’s not a problem.”