Track Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster En Route to Mars
Earlier this month, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched Falcon Heavy, the company’s most powerful rocket to date. Inside was a red Tesla Roadster sports car with built-in cameras to capture what it sees, as well as a copy of the Isaac Asimov Foundation ‘s science fiction book series and an airplane engraved with the names of 6,000 SpaceX employees. Destination of the car: Mars.
So what does the road to Mars actually look like?
One space enthusiast has created a vehicle tracking website using NASA data to track the course of a roadster. The aptly named Where’s the Roadster? The site offers real-time data on the Roadster’s current location, as well as an interactive tool to help you see where it is headed.
As it turns out, the car does not fly directly to the Red Planet. Like all other things, it has to deal with the force of gravity working against it, which means that instead of going straight to Mars, it moves in a small arc.
Right now, the roadster and its passenger, a dummy named Starman, are about 2.25 million miles from Earth and 137.5 million miles from Mars. It is not expected to arrive at its destination until October 2020.
And bad news for Starman if he runs into trouble along the way: the car exceeded its 36,000-mile warranty by 636 times while driving on the Sun.