On this day seven years ago, SpaceX launched the maiden flight of Falcon Heavy, a rocket used for heavy-lift and deep space missions, with a special payload on board: a cherry red 2008 Tesla Roadster owned by Elon Musk. The sports car was permanently mounted on the rocket’s upper stage and had a spacesuit-clad dummy named “Starman” sitting in its driver’s seat. The car disappeared from telescopes about a month after its launch—until last month.
On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., an organization collecting data on small celestial bodies in the solar system, announced the discovery of an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41. Submitted by a citizen scientist, the object was drifting at an altitude of under 150,000 miles (240,000 km) above Earth, classifying it as a near-Earth object (NEO) that warranted monitoring for its potential to collide with our planet in the future.
Hours later, with the help of professional and amateur astronomers, the MPC found out it wasn’t an asteroid after all, but the Tesla Roadster launched into space seven years ago. The car is still mounted to the Falcon Heavy rocket’s upper stage, according to a note published by the MPC on Jan. 3.
Tracking the Roadster’s location in space has become an annual curiosity. Simulation sites like WhereIsRoadster.com estimate the vehicle’s real-time location based on NASA data. According to the site, the vehicle is currently moving away from Earth and toward Mars.
According to SpaceX’s own calculation, the Roadster completed its first orbit around the Sun in August 2019 and made its first close approach to Mars on Oct. 7, 2020.
Unless it crashes into Earth or Mars, the Roadster will float around in the solar system for several million years, according to NASA. But solar and cosmic radiation and micrometeoroid impacts will likely destroy the vehicle over time. In 2019, Musk tweeted that SpaceX might one day launch a small spacecraft to catch up with the Roadster and take photographs or even bring it back to Earth for research.
At the Roadster’s launch in 2018, Musk set Starman to listen to endless loops of David Bowie’s Space Oddity in one ear and Life On Mars? in the other during the journey. If his battery were still working, the dummy would have listened to these two songs almost a million times by now.
