Elon Musk's Starman and His Roadster Are Now Far Beyond Mars
SpaceX on Friday posted a tweet about the current location of the red Tesla Roadster and the Starman that were carried by the Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this year. The news proves that the spacecraft is officially miles and miles away from its home planet.
This is one of the greatest distances from the Sun, and the team is hopeful that Starman should reach its far point at 155 million miles on November 8th, this year.
Elon Musk's obsession with Douglas Adams works
"Starman's current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe," SpaceX posted on Twitter Friday, along with an orbit diagram.
Starman’s current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe. pic.twitter.com/Ty5m8IjJpE
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 3, 2018
The second statement in the SpaceX’s tweet clearly refers to the second novel in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series that was penned down by the great author Douglas Adams. This sentence of the tweet clearly showcases that the CEO and Chief of SpaceX Elon Musk, as the whole world, is a big fan of the writer's work.
The novel series consists of five books namely, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless which were released from 1979 to 1992. On September 2008, it was announced that a sixth book in the series will also be released to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the original novel release.
The sixth book was titled ‘And Another Thing’ which was penned down by Elen Colfer and came out in October 2009.
What will be the fate of Tesla Roadster?
According to the models of Ben Pearson, who has elegantly put the tracking of Roadster and Starman on the website called WhereIsRoadster.com, the dummy Starman will not be able to make anywhere near to the blue planet until November 2020, and even then, its distance from Earth will be approximately 32 million miles away.
Ben Pearson models also point that the mannequin will probably be around 4.6 million miles apart from Mars on October 6th, 2020 and the dummy might not be in close vicinity to home until 2091.
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Also, a research team who were curious to know the date of the red electric car and its mannequin driver performed a series of continuous computer simulations. They tracked the path of the car through the next 3 million years in the solar system.
This orbit modeling survey revealed that the chances of Tesla Roadster crashing into the Earth and Venus are around 6 percent and 2.5 percent respectively in the coming 1 million years.
Elon Musk's spacesuit-clad mannequin dummy seems to be enjoying the cosmic journey and we should hope to see both of them safe and sound again after a couple of decades.
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