In 2018, SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy rocket carrying Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car into space from Florida, USA. The Tesla convertible is just a launch test, not a science mission. Behind the wheel of a $100,000 Tesla Roadster is “Starman” – a dummy wearing a space suit.
For the past 5 years, many people have been curious about the fate of the Tesla Roadster in the vast universe. Based on NASA data on tracking the Tesla, the researchers calculated to come up with an answer.
After 5 years of being launched into space, as of early June 2023, billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster has flown more than 3.2 billion km, completing about 2.6 times around the Sun. Currently, the vehicle is about 322 million km from Mars and about 377 million km from Earth.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, thinks it’s likely the tram is still intact. In the process of wandering in space, it is possible that some meteorites have attached to the vehicle.
During its journey, the vehicle mainly passes through the barren, empty vacuum, and sometimes it will come quite close to other celestial bodies.
In 2020, this Tesla Roadster makes its first close approach to Mars with a distance of more than 8 million km. According to NASA data, it is not until 2035 that Starman can “meet” Mars again, and by 2047 and 2050, it will “meet” with Earth at a distance of just a few million kilometers.
One study found that a Tesla has about a 22% chance of hitting Earth within the next 15 million years, compared with a 12% chance of a Venus or Sun collision.
In fact, it is very difficult to determine the exact path that the Tesla will travel through. And because studying the vehicle’s orbit does not have much scientific value, tracking and collecting data about it is of little interest to scientists. The last time scientists observed the Tesla was in March 2018, about a month after it was launched into space.
If the Tesla electric car actually collides with Earth, it will burn up when it comes into contact with the thick atmosphere of the blue planet. Perhaps in many millions of years, we also don’t know the final fate of Starman and the Tesla.