© Provided by Live Science Starman sent pictures home before leaving Earth orbit.
The roadster will orbit around the sun in a path that takes it as far as Mars and as close as Earth. It'll reach its farthest point from the sun in November, and in September 2019, it will complete. Update: It seems the Roadster overshot its intended Mars orbit and is instead headed towards the asteroid belt. Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt.
Starman — the dummy riding a cherry-red Tesla Roadster through space — has made his closest approach ever to Mars.
That electric convertible with its mannequin passenger bolted to the top of a Falcon Heavy rocket as a stunt during the SpaceX rocket's first test launch Feb, 6, 2018. (It's common for test launches to include heavy payloads, but they're usually more boring than cherry-red sportscars.) Two years later, the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the vehicle at its tip are making their second trip around the sun. Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks space objects as a side project, found that Starman passed 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) from Mars at 2:25 a.m. EDT Oct. 7. That's about 19 times the distance from Earth to the moon, and 35 times closer than anyone on Earth has gotten to Mars.
(The closest recent approach between the two planets was 34.8 million miles (56 million km) in 2003, according to World Atlas, though the planets are often hundreds of millions of miles apart.)
Starman, last seen leaving Earth, made its first close approach with Mars today—within 0.05 astronomical units, or under 5 million miles, of the Red Planet pic.twitter.com/gV8barFTm7October 7, 2020
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No one can see the Falcon Heavy upper stage at its current distance. And the strange, beautiful images it once beamed home to Earth have long since ceased. But orbits over periods of a few years are fairly straightforward to predict, and McDowell used data about how the rocket was moving when it left Earth's gravity behind to pinpoint its recent movements.
Tesla Roadster Orbit Path
The Roadster-bearing rocket stage is on an asymmetrical orbital course that takes it as far as 1.66 times Earth's distance from the sun at one end of its trek — out beyond the orbit of Mars — and then back within Earth's orbit at the other end, 0.99 times Earth's distance from the sun.
The stage has passed through the second aphelion of its 0.99 x 1.66 AU orbit and a couple of days ago passed back inside the orbit of Mars. pic.twitter.com/C6b8LffPuyOctober 7, 2020
Last time Starman circled the sun, McDowell said, it crossed Mars' orbit while the Red Planet was quite far away. But this time the crossing lined up with a fairly close approach — though still not close enough to feel a strong tug of Martian gravity.
At this point, if you were to go look at the Roadster, it probably would look pretty different. As Live Science reported in 2018, the harsh solar radiation environment between the planets would probably have wrecked all the exposed organic materials (red paint, rubber tires, leather seats and the like), breaking the carbon bonds that hold them together. And without Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetic shielding, even the robust plastics in the windshield and carbon fiber materials would start to disintegrate. Over the course of decades or centuries, the car should be reduced to its aluminum frame and sturdiest glass parts — assuming none of them get destroyed in impacts with passing space rocks.
Originally published on Live Science.
In this handout photo provided by SpaceX in February 2018, a Tesla Roadster launched from the Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy driver named “Starman” heads toward Mars. SpaceX via Getty Images
Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in the world, into space with Musk’s personal 2008 Tesla Roadster on board. To make the launch more fun, Musk put a spacesuit-clad dummy named “Starman” in the driver’s seat of the Roadster and had him listen to endless loops of David Bowie’s Space Oddity during the journey.
Is There A Tesla In Space
Since then, Starman has spent more than 550 days in outer space. According to WhereIsRoadster.com, an independent site tracking the electric car’s real-time location, the vehicle had completed its first orbit around the sun by Sunday, traveling nearly 763 million miles since last year’s launch.
Tesla Roadster Orbiting
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“If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity151,881 times since he launched,” the tracking site says. But that’s not very likely, because Tesla’s battery would only last for about 12 hours after liftoff, Musk said at the Falcon Heavy’s post-launch briefing at Kennedy Space Center last year. Cisco anyconnect secure mobility client 4.6 download windows 10.
The Starman’s current location is about 185 million miles from Earth, according to the tracking site. To be able to see it from here, one would need a telescope with a diameter of at least 43,823 feet.
The cherry-red Roadster was originally sent on a path toward Mars’ orbit. Because of the car’s unsterile condition, planetary scientists had worried about bacterial contamination once it crashed into the red planet, which would muddle scientific efforts to search for life on Mars.
But a later calculation by University of Toronto astrophysicist Hanno Rein estimated that the Roadster would more likely crash into Earth, Venus or the sun—in as soon as 10 million years.
As predicted by that calculation, last November, Starman passed the Mars orbit and drifted further into the solar system toward the asteroid belt.
The car is currently moving away from Earth at a speed of about 988 miles per hour, per WhereIsRoadster.com. It will fly near Mars again on October 7 next year and come relatively close to Earth every 30 years.
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Where Is The Space Tesla Today
Rein’s study suggests that we may even get a telescopic glimpse of the Roadster within 100 years if the car flies within one Earth-moon distance.
Tesla Roadster Orbiting The Sun
After its third Earth flyby, the Roadster’s path will get increasingly chaotic and unpredictable due to Earth’s gravitational tug that will cause small changes in some of the car’s orbital parameters every time it comes close.