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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.
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.
I'll chance it!
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Why is Musk being celebrated for launching purpose-built space junk? I remember when space junk was considered a problem.
I hope he has collision
before 2091, as being space junk and a hazard to interplanetary spacecraft.
That's if Elon's dream of cheap spaceflight and interplanetary travels becomes reality.
I am fine with it.
I'm kind of surprised Musk didn't grandstand a bit and offer a large prize for reclaiming the Tesla intact, like $100 million or something?
It would obviously cost more than that with today's tech to actually pull it off, but it would be kind of amusing if in 20 years or something someone was actually able to cobble together a robotic mission to grab it and bring it back AND turn a profit on the whole thing.
If he had sold the roadster and given the money to some worthwhile charity or humanitarian cause, then the chance would be 0% .
As it stands the chance is 6%, but that was a 100% ass clown stunt with no meaning and no purpose whatsoever. Intellectually it was on the same level as the likes of Logan Paul.
You can do better, Elon.
After that I'll be gone and won't care.
Maybe by then there'll be enough charge stations to use electric cars effectively.
I plan to live forever.
Based on my, so far very successful, plan to live forever it is a near certainty that it will hit the earth within my life time. That Bastard is messing up my planet!
First law of people: People are generally stupid.
...whether there is, in fact, a dead hooker in the trunk.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
He's being celebrated because it's now Space junk, instead of Earth junk.
You try strapping several rockets all together and try to make it work out.
Just like Marvin, I expected an Earth-shatterimng Kaboom...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I plan to live forever.
Or you'll die trying!
I was not a huge fan of Star Trek: Voyager - but, in my mind, one of the funnier scenes occurred when they ran across an old pickup in space.
#DeleteChrome
Orbits of solar system objects aren't predictable to anywhere near the accuracy required to make that statement meaningfully. Especially not relatively light-weight and complex-shaped things like cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
To be more exact, you can run a zillion simulations to come up with a probability, but all of the hit/miss scenarios are meaningless if they're too far in the future.
and it would likely burn up as it entered the atmosphere.
I'm no expert, but since asteroid usually need to be over 25 meter to reach ground (Look at Asteroid Fast Facts NASA on google), could be remove the "likely" out of the sentence?
Elok
Musk is so great at self promotion, he could get a DUI, shit in his pants, get pulled over , punch the cop, get arrested and sent to jail and his PR people would come out with:
"Musk's Tesla saves him from drunk driver and his innovated feces trapping pants kept car clean. Police so awestruck by the disruptive innovative design, falls into Musk's fist and takes him to station to discuss further."
Musk/Tesla fanboys will then parrot the statement and use it as proof at how successful Tesla is and use it as a counter argument for any and all rational arguments as to why the PR statement is total horseshit.
Tesla/Musk is a religion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Then the UK will have it's first decent roadster.
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.
We put up thousand of satellites and booster that fall back to Earth. Were was the question and research about that? No one even questions every time the DOD pops a spy satellite in orbit. They come down too. The Chinese have their first 'space station' about ready to deorbit and they have no idea where it is coming down.
A million years? We should be worrying about deorbiting junk now. Some lasers to destabilize orbital junk slowly, a few heating zaps which is also photon pressure, at a time would be a good idea; we did create the mess. But then burying our nuclear waste properly would be a good idea too. We seem lax on passing our problems down to the next generation. That is not standing up like adults in the room. More tanks but not cleaning up after.
I plan to live forever.
That was my plan too. Once.
I've learned though that Mother Nature has a different plan. And fighting it is a losing proposition.
But I hope things work out for you.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
how is throwing junk in space worthy of admiration?
It always hits Moe's bar.
Call the lawyers!!!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Modeling cars in space may have more error than modeling chunks of rock. Shiny side anyone? Were the tires inflated and will there be extra thrust when they leak or get punctured.
So far, we've discovered 15,000 rocks in orbits crossing close to Earth ("Near Earth Objects"), and the best estimate is that we've found about one quarter of the ones larger than 140 meters in diameter.
Wheelbase of a Tesla roadster is about four meters.
For every Tesla roadster in Earth-crossing orbit-- one--there are a million rocks that are at least that big.
There are a lot of asteroids. But, fortunately (quoting Douglas Adams), space is big. Really big.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I am 100% confident that the car will never hit the Earth, because I fully expect that within the next couple hundred years it will be retrieved and put on display in a museum somewhere. Maybe the Luna City museum or the Ceres Museum; some Earth museum is also possible.
Right now, retrieving it is theoretically possible but such a huge and expensive undertaking that it's totally unreasonable. But if we build out our infrastructure, we will have spacecraft flitting between Earth, Mars, and the asteroids and sending a tow truck to grab the Roadster will be no big deal.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
same thinking sportscentre4u
We interrupt our regular programming to bring you this important breaking news. We have just learned that an unknown spacecraft is approaching Earth, origins and intentions unknown. Radar and satellite imaging reveal it to be massive in size. No direct contact has been possible so far. However, an emissary from the spaceship has teleported to the Missouri headquarters of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. This non-corporeal entity has occupied the body of an executive secretary who now speaks on behalf of the enigmatic stellar visitor. The entity is quoted as saying, “We seek the Musk unit. You will assist us. I have been programmed by St’man to observe functioning of the carbon-based units infesting the Enterprise. St’man travels here to find the Creator. You may not speak directly to St’man, but if the carbon based units insist on direct dialogue, you will be permitted to speak to copilot Don Panic.”
Is STARMAN in Good Hands? (LOL!)
Opening scene
Elon Musk launches a car into space... Meanwhile, somewhere else in the world... A dog is peeing on a fire hydrant... We are so evolved as a species!
What if there is an actual human being sitting in the seat of the car? Elon might be a criminal mastermind. He could have run over a person with his car, and then get all of the world to see him put the evidence of his crime on an orbit around mars.
And we all applauded him while he did it.
Genius!
I would read that book...
it's the asteroid that it knocks out of the asteroid belt into a collision course with Earth that's the problem.
Current civilisation crumbles and by the time the roadster crashes down to earth, civilisation has rebuilt itself to the point of 1940s technology.
...maybe this has happened before...
The car comes crashing down in a place coincidentally named Roswell, and top scientists harvest this strange extraterrestrial technology for the wonders of ICs, microcontrollers & Li-ion batteries.
Obviously the government don't want to cause panic that some alien craft crashed from space, so they subtly release technology based on this 'Tesla' civilisation's tech and take credit of these wonderful inventions themselves.
zero
i could live a little longer in this prison
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/voy_the37s012.jpg
long before it even gets anywhere remotely close to Mars, let alone coming back to Earth.
Imagine if you would, the situation between Iran and Israel escalates to an unbelievable horror. The US is forced to intervene, but not without Russia intervening on behalf of Iran. Imagine a quick escalation between tactical nukes and country-wrecking megaton class weapons. The fallout and hellscape firestorms consumes nearly all of man and the information it has collected over the past thousands of years. Books, gone. Digital data, gone. Google, Facebook, and Amazon's datacenters, seen as a high value target by Russia, are directly targeted. Nothing remains. Most servers are taken offline permanently due to the effects of the thousands of EMPs. Those not destroyed by EMP have no power. Most of those with the knowledge and skill to rebuild the infrastructure are dead from either the blast, effects of fallout, or starvation. FEMA is overwhelmed, unable to distribute food to the targeted metro areas.
Hundreds or thousands of years pass, and humanity is rebuilding itself. Astrology is rediscovered and a few years later, a red car is seen passing over Earth with no explanation. The car comes crashing to Earth and the only thing that remains is a smoldering lithium battery, the frame, and a tiny red Tesla inside what used to be the glovebox.
I don't know where I was going with this... but welcome to my imagination.
Can we mount a parachute in it? It would be so nice to put my hands in it.
a la Dumb and Dumber
...there's still part of me wishing they would have launched something semi-useful. Something like having a competition for building an ultra cheap satellite. I think it would be pretty inspiring to be part of a college team that built a satellite, then it could be tracked and used for lessons down the road. Maybe they would find unexpected readings. Or they could have launched something with an experimental energy source / materials, something for science, etc.
So now i'm waiting for Gravity 2 and we will probably see a tesla crash into a space station.....
In the far future, we'll be visited by "Tosa", and it will want to speak to its creator. And we'll need a bald chick to communicate.
Iâ(TM)d bet it will be sitting in some museum within a hundred years.
In 1000 years, when Elon Musk and this launch are tiny footnotes in obscure history books, there will be some inhabitants of the Asteroid Belt scratching their heads and going "WHAT THE FUCK?!" when they find that car.