Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster, which launched on top of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy earlier today, is going farther out into the Solar System than originally planned. - The Verge

Overachiever
"But now it seems that engine ignition worked a little too well. SpaceX CEO Musk tweeted out a map of the roadster’s final orbit after the burn, showing just how far out the car will travel. And it looks like it’s going so far into the asteroid belt that it will get relatively close to the orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres.

It’s unclear what exactly will happen to the car: Before the Tesla launched, Musk said that there was an extremely tiny chance that the vehicle would ever hit Mars. But there’s been no clarification about how this new path will affect the car’s chances of running into some other space object. And planetary scientists on Twitter want more answers about the exact orbit to calculate the Tesla’s odds of collision, and how long it will actually last in deep space."
 
Elon Musk’s Tesla roadster, which launched on top of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy earlier today, is going farther out into the Solar System than originally planned. - The Verge

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