Six years ago, Elon Musk’s SpaceX sent a Tesla into space – a stunt that even the most die-hard Musk haters would reluctantly admit was pretty cool.
The Roadster has had an insane journey since then, and is currently moving away from Earth at an impressive speed of 25,290 kilometers per hour (15,715 miles per hour), while boasting an arguably even more impressive fuel economy 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 orbited the sun 4.1 times, flipping over in the process, according to the Where Is Roadster tracker. In 2018, we were able to observe the vehicle up close as it approached Earth.
Keeping an eye on the car is not necessarily the most pressing concern of astronomers (what the heck is going on with all these disappearing stars), but some have tried to predict the fate of the vehicle and find out if it poses a threat to Earth.
In 2018, a study did just that, although it was a difficult task due to the car’s eccentric orbit.
“The Roadster shares many similarities with near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), which are chaotically distributed throughout the inner Solar System due to (i) repeated close encounters with the terrestrial planets and (ii) the effects of mean motion and secular resonances,” the team explains in the paper.
“NEAs initially enter their orbits from the more distant main belt via strong resonances (such as the secular 𝜈6 resonance or the strong 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter). Upon entering these escape routes, many NEAs are driven into nearly radial orbits that dip into the Sun.”
This makes the probability of an impact on terrestrial planets seem relatively low at just over 2 percent. However, with the Tesla it is a little different.
“The Tesla’s initial orbit brushes against that of Earth, so one might expect an initial phase of increased collision probability with Earth before it is randomly directed onto a more NEA-like trajectory,” the team continued. “It is therefore unclear whether the Tesla is likely to diffuse into distant, strong resonances and suffer the same fate as the wider NEA population, or whether it would first strike one of the terrestrial planets.”
Using Tesla’s orbit, which crosses those of Mars and Earth, the team was able to predict the likelihood of a collision with terrestrial planets (including our favorite planet, Earth).
The car will make another approach in 2047 at a distance of about 5 million kilometers (3.1 million miles). After more than 100 years, repeated approaches to the planets make long-term predictions of the car’s chaotic orbit “impossible.”
“However, using an ensemble of several hundred realizations, we were able to statistically determine the probability of a collision of the Tesla with the planets of the solar system on astronomical timescales,” the team wrote.
On a much longer timescale, the team calculated that the car has about a 22 percent chance of hitting Earth, a 12 percent chance of colliding with Venus, and about the same chance of hitting the sun as Venus. Fortunately for Musk, this will happen on a timescale of millions of years and is unlikely to affect Tesla’s stock price.
The Starman placed inside the vehicle – assuming it is still intact and somehow develops consciousness – can pray for an earlier impact. During its journey through space, the puppet has heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” over 624,000 times in one ear, and “Life On Mars?” has been played over 841,000 times in its other ear.
The study was published in Aerospace.