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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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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