Four Years in Space: Tesla Roadster Has Orbited the Sun Over Two Times
In February 2018, SpaceX launched the 2018 Tesla Roadster into space. After four years, the Tesla Roadster has traveled throughout the Solar System.
This electric supercar was launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket. Sitting in the driver’s seat is “Starman” – a mannequin dressed in an astronaut suit. The red supercar has now orbited the Sun 2.62 times.
Tesla Roadster with mannequin driver “Starman” was launched into space by SpaceX in 2018, aiming for Mars. (Photo: SpaceX).
The Tesla Roadster and its mannequin driver completed their first orbit around the Sun in August 2019. In October 2020, the Tesla Roadster made its first pass near Mars.
“My car is flying around Mars,” Elon Musk shared on Twitter in December 2021. However, according to Jonathan Dowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Musk was mistaken.
Dowell stated that the vehicle is essentially still orbiting the Sun, having only crossed a small portion of Mars’ orbit around the Sun. This is quite different from Musk’s claim of it orbiting Mars as a satellite.
According to the tracking website “Where is Roadster?”, every 557 days, the red car completes a trip around the Sun. The site indicates that the Roadster is currently about 235 million miles (377 million kilometers) away from Earth, or 20.97 light minutes, traveling at a speed of 6,470 km/h.
Tesla has set up a loop of songs for the mannequin “Starman” to listen to throughout its space journey. The song “Space Oddity” plays in one ear, while “Life On Mars” plays in the other, both composed by David Bowie.
If the headphones are still functioning, “Starman” will have listened to “Space Oddity” and “Life On Mars” a total of 397,224 and 535,242 times, respectively.
Initially, SpaceX aimed to direct the supercar towards Mars’ orbit, hoping that the Tesla Roadster would eventually enter the planet. This raised concerns among scientists about the potential for the Roadster to contaminate the planet, as the car had not been sterilized.
According to WhereIsRoadster, the Tesla is currently about 3,218,688 km away from Mars. However, calculations by astrophysicist Hanno Rein from the University of Toronto suggest that the Roadster could collide with Earth, Venus, or the Sun in about 10 million years.
So far, his calculations have proven accurate. As predicted by Rein, in November 2018, “Starman” passed through Mars’ orbit and drifted toward the asteroid belt of the Solar System.
