When Elon Musk decided to send his personal Tesla into space, it did raise a few eyebrows. After 5 years of it hovering in space, the main question that people have been asking is- where is it now? As of the 6th of February, the sports car has been wandering in the oblivion of space for exactly half a decade. When a single year passed, the estimated data highlighted that the vehicle had completed close to three and a quarter loops around the Sun.
It was also positioned at a distance of 203 million miles from our planet, according to the website created to track this very Roadster. The cherry sports car has also logged in close to 2.5 billion miles in space as it has hurtled through a barren vacuum. In 2020, 2 years after the car was launched into space, the vehicle was making its very first close approach to the Red planet, as it passed by just 5 million miles of the Martian planet. This could also be construed as about 20 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Musk’s Tesla In Space Could Be Anywhere Between Mars and the Sun
Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to pinpoint the location of this Tesla in space, and there is no way through which one could be absolutely certain of the car’s location in space. One cannot even state with certainty if the car is still in a single piece, has been obliterated beyond repair by a meteoroid, or eroded beyond recognition by radiation. No direct observation of the car could be made ever since it was blasted into orbit atop the Falcon Heavy rocket- therefore, every single shred of data that we have currently is just based on the calculated estimates that the trajectory of the car could take it to.
It must also be mentioned that none of the astronomers- at SpaceX or NASA– have much enthusiasm or interest in tracking the car’s trajectory, for it doesn’t really offer a lot regarding scientific value. At the end of the day, the Roadster was simply considered a throw-away dummy payload for the first-ever mission of the Falcon Heavy in February 2018. Interestingly, this was a launch that even Musk considered would have a 50-50 shot at being successful.
Or Has It Been Blown To Smithereens?
Impressively enough, the launch went off without a hitch, and ever since it was catapulted into space, the car has been circling the Sun in its own orbit. It has charted an oblong path that would be swinging as far out as the orbital path of Mars, and as close to the Sun as the orbit of the Earth. On Monday, if its patterns were to be believed, the Tesla in space had just intersected the path of Mars- while the planet was on the other side of the Sun.
Before the car’s launch in 2018, a lot of fanfare had been associated with it. As it stands, SpaceX had managed to load up the car with a bunch of Easter eggs. A spacesuit-clad mannequin, dubbed Starman, sat behind the wheel. The dashboard had a sign that read ‘Don’t Panic,’ which references Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The car also contained a data storage device with all Isaac Asimov’s works, along with a plaque with the names of thousands of employees employed at SpaceX.
When Musk launched the car into space, he stated that he hoped humanity would also be able to establish settlements on other planets in our solar system. This has been one of the longest-running fantasies of Elon Musk that has been the main theme of SpaceX’s stated mission to colonize Mars finally. Musk joked that if it did happen one day, he hoped that his descendants would find the discarded Roadster and take it to a museum.