Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
This isn't orbiting the Earth. It's no more a problem than any chunk of rock orbiting our star.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Bullshit
There needed to be a test load. Instead of a lump of concrete he used an old car. No more dangerous, no CO2 emissions from making the concrete, much more interesting, and funny for those whose sense of humor is more evolved than bathroom jokes.
I agree. I will take my chances and if in the next million years a car falls on me. Hey Free Car!
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
"Space junk" is only a problem in Earth orbit, where it has a significant chance of colliding with other important objects. The smaller, scattered debris left behind by launches or collisions is the real problem, as it's harder to track. When the Chinese intentionally blew up one of their own satellites in an anti-satellite missile test around a decade ago, it caused a real uproar, because they intentionally created thousands of pieces of debris that would be a problem for many decades to come.
This solar-orbiting Roadster is not any sort of real problem worth complaining about, unless you just want to grump about something.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
Well first of all it was cool as hell. Second of all this was test of the big ass rocket they used. Normally they would use dead weight like lead or sand, but this time Musk just decided to use his car.
An yes, there are other reasons. Mainly it was a publicity stunt for Space X. An it was a good one. It has people focused on space travel again. Anything that does that in a positive manner is a good thing to me.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Make that a '58 convertible corvette with some bitch'n heavy metal music playing and you might be on to something....
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
We have a way to deal with them. Send offshore oil drillers into space and break up the rock in dramatic fashion with explosives. Saw a documentary about it once.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
...were in fact free Tesla/SpaceX advertising....
While you make a good point, my local news had a longish piece last night about Black Panther as if yet another superhero movie is something remarkable.
Wait a minute. Jaguar and Aston Martin have made some terrific roadsters. I had a 1960s MGB roadster in the '80s that was great (though useless in Chicago winters). Triumph roadsters were some of the coolest cars ever made. If anything, the UK has had too many decent roadsters.
http://car-from-uk.com/carphot...
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Black Panther as if yet another superhero movie is something remarkable
People are making a big deal out of the Black Panther, some are saying it is the first black super hero. They are forgetting Blade with Wesley Snipes was back in 1998, 20 years ago.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
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
Blade was more antihero than super hero; along with Hancock, and do we count DeadShot in Suicide Squad?
Plus I recently watched, Luke Cage on Netflix, but that wasn't a feature film.
I agree perhaps Black Panther isn't the first, but there aren't really a lot. And there HAVE been a pile of marvel and DC super hero movies made in the last decade - ive lost count -- between Thor, Captain America, Spiderman, Superman and Batman and their sequels its already at least a dozen or more, and that's before even looking at Green Lantern or Antman or other lesser known names, what percentage of them were black vs white? so I don't see why anyone would take issue with a bit of fanfare around this one being about a black hero. It doesn't happen all that often.
I'm trying to forget Suicide Squad but also totally forgot about Luke Cage.
I don't have any problem with fanfare, I just didn't want Blade swept under the rug. Blade was a nice breath of fresh air after sparkly vampires and romantic vampires.....
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
As someone on the internet recently said, "Thanks to Elon Musk there is now a non-zero chance of getting hit by a car in space."
Having been someone on the internet who has said this, and not remembering the source, I'll take credit for this insightfully stupid comment.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Who's the cat that won't cop out
when there's danger all about?
(Shaft)
Right on
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I'm not sure why China got so much flak for for testing ASAT, when the US did the same thing a few years prior.
I did a bit of looking into this.
Are you talking about the US Navy shootdown in 2008? Ostensibly, the US brought down their malfunctioning satellite in order to prevent it from becoming a hazard due to a large amount of toxic fuel on board. In that case, the satellite was already on its way down, and the destruction just made sure it would completely burn up in the atmosphere. According to reports at the time, all the debris was expected to re-enter the atmosphere within 40 days.
There was a much earlier test in 1985, but since then, we've had a self-imposed ban on doing so, for precisely the reason we are now seeing with the Chinese test. In China's case, the hundred thousand pieces of debris from their test a decade ago is still orbiting the planet, and will continue to orbit for several more decades at least. It was destroyed at an altitude of 537 miles, so the debris will last much longer than what was caused by the US test, which was destroyed at 350 miles. Orbital decay is not linear, which means that the US test's debris likely had a significantly shorter time-to-decay than the Chinese test.
So, no, the US record isn't exactly spotless here, but hopefully everyone's learned their lesson about this sort of thing.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.