

The Tesla’s first close pass of Earth will occur in 2091; after that, it has a 50 percent chance of continuing to orbit for a few tens of millions of years, before it either collides with a planet or falls into the Sun. For now,it’s on its way out past Mars, carrying an appropriate message: Don’t panic.

The authors calculated the probabilities by fast-forwarding the Tesla’s orbit — along with the orbits of the planets — over time and observing whether collisions occurred over the course of many simulations. In addition to the probability of colliding with Earth, they also found only a 2.5 percent chance the Tesla will collide with Venus in the next one million years. Though they predict several close calls with Mars, they don’t believe it is likely to collide with the Red Planet. After three million years, they only observed one collision with the Sun.The Tesla, which is estimated to rotate about once every five minutes based on reflected light measured with the 4.1-meter SOAR telescope in Chile, is on an orbit that will cross the orbits of not only Earth, but also Venus and Mars, several times over the course of its dynamically stable lifetime. According to Rein, this orbit is not unlike that of many near-Earth Asteroids regularly observed. In fact, the Tesla has been officially labeled by NASA as a Near-Earth Object and listed in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Horizon’s database as object -143205 SpaceX Roadster (spacecraft) (Tesla). It is one of about 150 manmade objects in the database, which allows you to chart any object’s position on the sky. According to the database, the Tesla is currently following an orbit with a perihelion of 0.99 astronomical units (AU, where 1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance) and an aphelion of 1.67 AU (Mars’ average distance from the Sun is about 1.5 AU).