An electric car that Elon Musk rocketed into space more than two years ago just flew past Mars for the first time.

SpaceX, the rocket company Musk founded, launched his old Tesla Roadster aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018 with a spacesuit-wearing dummy named ” Starman ” at the wheel.

The car also carried a Hot Wheels model of itself with a miniature Starman inside. In storage, it holds a copy of the sci-fi novels “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, along with a towel and a sign that says ” Don’t Panic .” The car’s speakers even blasted the song “Space Oddity” by David Bowie after launch.

Since then, the rocket’s second stage has glided through space with no fuel to propel it, with Musk’s old red car perched on top of it.

“It’s a rocket stage with a hood ornament,” Jonathan McDowell , an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who independently calculated the Tesla’s close Mars pass, told Business Insider.

The Tesla was supposed to slip into a circular orbit between Mars and the sun. But the mission overshot and ended up on an elliptical path that takes it far past Martian orbit , toward the asteroid belt; it completes an orbit about every 557 days. The car’s trajectory had taken it past Mars orbit before, but at that time the planet was nowhere near the point where Starman intersected its path.

The car made its first close approach to Mars at about 2:25 p.m. ET on Wednesday, passing about 7.4 million kilometers (4.6 million miles) from the red planet, according to McDowell’s calculations. (SpaceX on Wednesday tweeted a similar estimate of “under 5 million miles” for the flyby distance.)

Neither the Tesla nor the Falcon Heavy stage attached to it is sending signals back to Earth, so McDowell calculated its path from the last data available as it left Earth. He used the same gravitational data that NASA uses to steer its space probes.

“It’s a pretty confident extrapolation, because we understand gravity pretty well,” McDowell said. “The only thing that could throw you off is what we call outgassing: If there was leftover fuel, or if the paint job on the Tesla carriage came off, that acts as a little rocket that pushes it forward. But that won’t change it much.”

But Starman isn’t getting an up-close view of the Martian surface. According to McDowell’s math, at that distance the planet would appear to be about one-tenth the size of the moon as seen from Earth.

read more http://kayharry.com/elon-musks-tesla-roadster-car-fly-to-mars/

Issorite.

This guy Nigeria was begging ventilators from

I really love this......

Sole foools will say it's fake and that earth is flat



I mean...: they'll sit in their gaming chair googling shiiits and watching dumb YouTube videos from drug addicts and claim that's enough proof to counter what trained scientists and professors sacrificed years to know

Theriously?