Tesla Roadster Elon Musk Launched Into Space Has 6 Percent Chance of Hitting Earth In the Next Million Years (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk grabbed the world's attention last week after launching his Tesla Roadster into space. But his publicity stunt has a half-life way beyond even what he could imagine -- the Roadster should continue to orbit through the solar system, perhaps slightly battered by micrometeorites, for a few tens of millions of years. Now, a group of researchers specializing in orbital dynamics has analyzed the car's orbit for the next few million years. And although it's impossible to map it out precisely, there is a small chance that one day it could return and crash into Earth. But don't panic: That chance is just 6% over a million years, and it would likely burn up as it entered the atmosphere.

Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues regularly model the motions of planets and exoplanets. "We have all the software ready, and when we saw the launch last week we thought, 'Let's see what happens.' So we ran the [Tesla's] orbit forward for several million years," he says. The Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX propelled the car out toward Mars, but the sun's gravity will bring it swinging in again some months from now in an elliptical orbit, so it will repeatedly cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus until it sustains a fatal accident. The Roadster's first close encounter with Earth will be in 2091 -- the first of many in the millennia to come.

Comments

Mariner 4

[jfdavis668]

If you are worried about this car, why aren't you worried about Mariner 4? Or any other probe or rocket body that was sent on the same trajectory. They all may impact Earth some day.

Cross the orbit of Venus?

[david_thornley]

TFA says the roadster will cross the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus. The last burn was in Earth orbit, so obviously it'll return there. The burn gave it an apohelion well beyond Mars orbit, so obviously it'll cross it (assuming it's in the ecliptic). Every diagram I've seen has the Roadster's orbit roughly tangent to Earth orbit, as would happen if the burn increased its orbital velocity.

Without major changes to its orbit, the Roadster will stay at Earth orbit or further from the Sun. If it were to make a course correction, it could establish an even more elliptical orbit and cross Venus orbit, but the delta-vee of a Tesla Roadster in a frictionless vacuum is very, very low.