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Back in 2018, Elon Musk launched the Falcon Heavy into space, with a few extras attached to the rocket including a Tesla Roadster, ‘piloted’ by Starman – a mannequin in a spacesuit doomed to listen to David Bowie’s ‘Life on Mars’ for all eternity.

Or at least until the car crashes back to Earth, or Venus, as predicted in a research paper written by University of Toronto’s Hanno Rein. That will probably only happen in the next million years, so nothing to worry about there. Chances are Bowie’s song won’t last that long.

Starman and his ride were set to follow a projected path that would take them closer to Mars.

Two years later, and SpaceX tweeted yesterday that Starman had made its first close approach to the red planet.

Close is a relative term:

Five million miles is still quite “a long distance”, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN.

“Mars would appear about 1/10 the diameter of the Moon, so small but not a point.”

McDowell used NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system to track the rocket and says that it is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun.

He shared his findings on Twitter:

The stage has passed through the second aphelion of its 0.99 x 1.66 AU orbit and a couple of days ago passed back inside the orbit of Mars. pic.twitter.com/C6b8LffPuy

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) October 7, 2020

Using data from NASA’s JPL Horizons, space enthusiast Ben Pearson created a site, called Where Is Roadster, that tracks the car’s progress through space.

According to the site, as of 8:30AM today (Friday, October 9):

The current location is 37,259,115 miles (59,962,751 km, 0.401 AU, 3.33 light minutes) from Earth, moving toward Earth at a speed of 17,071 mi/h (27,474 km/h, 7.63 km/s).

The car is 4,700,212 miles (7,564,260 km, 0.051 AU, 0.42 light minutes) from Mars, moving away from the planet at a speed of 1,578 mi/h (2,539 km/h, 0.71 km/s).

Here’s a visual of its location:

Image: Where is Roadster

Those numbers are changing constantly. If you want live stats, head here.

McDowell says that the Roadster “will pass about 5 million km from Earth in the year 2047”.

Go, Starman, Go!

[source:cnn]