Six years ago, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched a Tesla into space, in a stunt that even the most die-hard Musk-haters would begrudgingly admit was pretty cool.
Since then, the Roadster has been on one hell of a ride, currently zipping away from Earth at an impressive 25,290 kilometers per hour (15,715 mph), with an perhaps more impressive fuel efficiency of 10,671 kilometers per liter (25,100 miles per gallon ), at the time of writing.
Since its launch on February 6, 2018, the car has circled the Sun 4.1 times according to the Where Is Roadster tracker, flipping as it goes. In 2018, we got a close look at the vehicle as it made its close approach to Earth.
Keeping track of the car isn’t exactly the most pressing concern of astronomers (like what the hell is going on with all those disappearing stars), but some tried to calculate the fate of the vehicle and whether it posed a threat to Earth.
In 2018, a paper did just that, although it was a difficult task due to the car’s eccentric orbit.
“The Roadster has many similarities to near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), which spread through the inner Solar System chaotically through (i) repeated close encounters with terrestrial planets and (ii) the effects of mean motion and secular resonances,” the team explains in the document.
“NEAs initially reach their orbits from the more distant Main Belt through strong resonances (such as the secular 𝜈6 resonance or the strong 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter). As they enter these escape routes, many NEAs head into near-radial orbits that dive into the Sun.”
This puts the probability of an impact with the terrestrial planets at a relatively low, just over 2 percent. However, Tesla is a little different.
“Tesla’s initial orbit matches that of Earth, so an initial period of increased collision probabilities with Earth can be expected before it is randomized to a more NEA-like trajectory,” the team continued. “It is therefore unclear whether the Tesla is likely to propagate to distant, strong resonances and suffer the same fate as the wider NEA population, or whether it will hit one of the terrestrial planets first.”
By looking at Tesla’s orbit, which intersects the orbit of Mars and Earth, the team was able to predict the probability of it colliding with the terrestrial planets (including our beloved Earth).
The rover will make another close approach in 2047, about 5 million kilometers (3.1 million miles) away. Beyond 100 years, repeated close encounters with the planets make long-term predictions about the car’s chaotic orbit “impossible.”
“Nevertheless, using an ensemble of several hundred realizations, we were able to statistically determine the probability of a Tesla colliding with the planets of the Solar System on astronomical time scales,” the team wrote.
Over a much longer time frame, the team calculated that the car has about a 22 percent chance of hitting Earth, a 12 percent chance of hitting Venus, and about the same chance of hitting the Sun as it does Venus. Fortunately for Musk, this will happen on a time scale of millions of years and is unlikely to affect Tesla’s stock prices.
A Starman placed in the vehicle, assuming it’s still intact and somehow achieves sentience, could beg for a quicker strike. While traveling in space, the dummy listened to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” over 624,000 times in one ear, and “Life On Mars?” has played in his other ear more than 841,000 times.
The research is published in Aerospace.
