[ad_1]
The territory around Mars became infinitely cooler when SpaceX’s “Starman,” the spacesuit dummy at the wheel of Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster that travels the solar system, made his first intimate flyby of the Red Planet this week, closing in on 5 million miles. of the reddish surface.
Starman’s Tesla was secured on the second stage of the Falcon Heavy Rocket when it first lifted off from the historic Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center more than two years ago to deafening cheers and applause. Now, the artificial motorist appears to be in control with confidence as his four-wheeled spaceship circles our neighboring planet, a major event in his strange odyssey.
SpaceX tweeted this memorable moment as the cherry red Tesla roadster approached Mars while in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.
“It’s a great distance,” Jonathan Dowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN. “Mars would appear about 1/10 the diameter of the Moon, so small but not a point. It will pass about 5 million kilometers from Earth in 2047. Not close enough to see it as a resolved object.”
According to the official website whereisroadster.com, the interplanetary vehicle has completed 1,7507 orbits around the Sun since it was launched in February 2018 on the first flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
Musk’s intrepid $ 100,000 car is currently more than 37 million miles from Earth and has ventured nearly 1.3 billion miles since he left our world. It will remain on a circular path around the Sun between Earth and Mars for the next hundreds of millions of years, with only a 6% chance of crashing back to Earth. Comforting calculations!
[ad_2]
