Where did the red roadster that Musk sent to space go 4 years later?

4 years ago, Elon Musk sent a red convertible Tesla into space with a Falcon Heavy rocket, and now, which corner of space did this big red convertible go to? Has it become space debris?

There is also a dummy driver in the sports car that Musk sent to space

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at harvard University's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently told the US media that the sports car is likely to still be one, but it may have been grazed by some meteoroids while traveling through the universe.

The roadster has reportedly "driven" nearly 2 billion miles over the past 4 years, circling the sun about 2.6 times, most of it through a barren, empty vacuum. According to SpaceX, the car completed its first orbit around the sun in August 2019 and first flew over Mars in October 2020. It is currently 234,366,378 miles (377,176,124 km or 20.97 light-minutes) from Earth and is moving away from our homes at 4,020 mph (6,470 km/h).

According to NASA, the roadster won't skim Mars again until 2035, during which time it's unlikely to pass near another planet. Subsequently, it will pass through Mars twice in 2047 and 2050 at a range of millions of miles from Earth.

An academic paper co-authored by Hannor Rein, an astrophysics professor at the University of Toronto, estimates that the chances of the car colliding with Earth in the next 15 million years are about 22 percent, and the chance of hitting Venus or the Sun is 12 percent each. Rein told the media that these probabilities are obviously not very high. He said the complexity and unpredictability of traveling through space makes it difficult for scientists to accurately predict the car's path. At the same time, since studying the trajectory of a roadster doesn't have much scientific value, astronomers aren't too interested in pointing their high-power telescopes in its direction to collect more data. He said the last time the sports car was observed was in March 2018, about a month after its launch. "If this car ends up colliding with Earth, we're going to have to hope it's torn to shreds when it hits Earth's atmosphere."

The ultimate fate of a sports car may not be known until millions of years later. But Musk said in 2018 that he hoped humans would have established settlements on other planets in the solar system and that Musk's descendants "would be able to tow the sports car back to the museum." ”

Red Star News reporter Hu Yiling

Edited by Pan Li

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