Elon Musk's Tesla is now approximately 376 million km from Earth and 482 million km from Mars.
In February 2018, the first successful launch of the SapceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle took place. As a payload, the rocket launched into space the personal car of the creator of the company — Tesla Roadster, reports the Chronicle.info with reference to Focus. . The head of SpaceX had no scientific goal when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space. He wanted whatever payload the Falcon Heavy rocket would take off Earth. As Musk himself said, «needed the most ridiculous thing imaginable». And he chose his personal car, in which he put a mannequin named «Starman», dressed in a spacesuit.
According to the latest data from NASA, Elon Musk's Tesla is now at a distance of approximately 376 million km from Earth and 482 million km from Mars. The car constantly approaches one planet after another during its flight.
«More All in all, this roadster is safe and sound, just hit by meteorite impacts», says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
According to NASA, in 4 years of space travel, the car covered a distance of 3.2 billion km, while it made 2.6 revolutions around the Sun. In 2020, a sports car approached Mars for the first time, within 8 million km of the planet, about 20 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The roadster will fly as close as possible to the Red Planet in 2035, and near the Earth it will be at a distance of several million kilometers in 2047 and 2050. Scientists have calculated that the chance of Musk's car falling to Earth over the next 15 million years is 22%, and that it will fall on Venus or the Sun over the same period of time is estimated at 12%.
«It is not possible to accurately calculate the trajectory of the car's future flight. Astronomers don’t pay much attention to it, because it’s not a valuable space object,” says Hanno Rein from the University of Toronto.
If the Tesla Roadster enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it will most likely burn up there before , as will be able to cause any damage on the surface of the planet. Scientists believe that the car will fly in space for millions of years and what will become of it is ultimately unknown.
