On Febuary 6th, 2018, SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster into orbit. Although somewhat of a publicity stunt, Starman, as dummy rider was later called, marked an impressive feat of engineering for the spacecraft manufacturer.
The very first launch of the Falcon Heavy would later spawn an immense variety of calculations, all of which show just how far and how deep Starman and his Tesla Roadster creep into the abyss.
Today, February 7th, one day after the Falcon Heavy's fifth anniversary, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster prances indefinitely through the starways. According to JJ Hermes on Twitter, the Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Boston University, rotational values and various brightness measures prove just how far the Starman has come.
In his post, Hermes also highlights how the car can be seen blinking via a telescope in Chile, detailing how it's "1 million KM away, tens of thousands of times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye."
Musk's Roadster has already circumnaviagted the sun itself 3.3 times, as reported via the website Where is Starman. Their insight points out various measurements, even including a replicated solar system that pinpoints exactly where the roadster now is in relation to us and our neighboring planets. The Starman certainly is well over one million km away from earth, as the astronomers behind the site posit a remarkable 327 million km and counting.
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Hilariously, Musk's Roadster has already well exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty, hitting a whopping 2.5 billion miles, traveling at a speed of 51 thousand miles per hour. Surprisingly, it has yet to be hit by any kind of space debris, and could well be on its way to a lengthy forever as it bounces between Earth and Mars' orbit.
Special music was also gifted the Starman so the never-ending silence of space could be drowned out by the awesome chords of David Bowie. Both his Life on Mars? and Space Oddity tracks play in Starman's right and left ears and have now been played 668,726 and 496,287 times, respectively. Quite alot of rock music for one person - that is, of course, if the battery even still works.
According to a report published by the journal of Aerospace, the Tesla Roadster does have some probabilities for hitting several celestial bodies. These include a 12 percent chance of ramming into Venus or the Sun, as well as a 22 percent probability of hitting our own planet. There were also some rare close encounters with both Mars and Mercury, but "none of them resulted in a physical collision," the paper concludes.
One must note that much of the data is represented in several millions of years, meaning that the Tesla Roadster isn't crashing into Earth any time soon. The Starman and his Roadster will, however, make a small trip relatively close to the planet within the next century at the very least, coming closer even than our moon.
