One of the craziest things Elon Musk did in his days at SpaceX was to shoot his own Tesla Roadster into space. The first Falcon 9 heavy rocket car ever launched by the company came to the top of the earth. The vehicle is then orbiting the sun.
Starman made a flyby closer to Mars this week when it comes within 5 million miles of the planet. The roadster is in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Jonathan Dowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the distance would be about 1/10 the diameter of the Moon. That means it will be small, but not a single point of light in the sky as we saw from the sky.
The astronomer also noted that in 2047, Starman will travel about 5 million kilometers from Earth. It is too far to be able to solve the vehicle as a too budget. Starman and his faithful ride have so far completed a little less than two orbits around the Sun. The vehicle passed Mars for the first time in November 2018.
The car is currently about 37 million miles from Earth and has traveled about 1.3 billion miles since it was put into orbit. The vehicle will orbit the sun between Earth and Mars for millions of years to come. He is assuming that he does not crash into any one planet. It is estimated that there is a six percent chance that it will collapse to Earth at some point in the future.
SpaceX is busy sending a replacement mission to ISS and getting ready for its first crew mission next month. It is also busy launching Starlink satellites and launching 60 new satellites with the latest launch on October 6.
