For those feeling sentimental about SpaceX’s freshly launched Tesla Roadster on its lonely trip into deep space, don't worry. Professional and amateur astronomers can tell you exactly where Starman will be as its car careens in orbit around the sun.



“The closest predicted approach to Mars between now and 2030 is 7 million km on 2020 Oct 8,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This is still well outside Mars' gravitational sphere of influence."

Starman's path will lead back toward Earth, but his return trip will be even farther away than the car's closest approach to Mars. “The Roadster will not return anywhere near Earth by 2030,” McDowell writes. “Closest it gets after this month is [March] 2021 at a distant 45 million km.”

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How do these guys know this stuff? After all, the solar system is constantly moving, which makes plotting the course of something as small as a Tesla car is an exercise in mapping time as well as space.



Luckily for the rest of us, it’s possible to calculate where the car is going, and what will be there when it gets there. We can use a publicly available tool called HORIZON, a service first released by NASA's JPL in 1996.

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The Tesla Roadster, now in solar orbit, has been officially logged as a celestial object by NASA:https://t.co/bDz2zFWdIc pic.twitter.com/CEVjBZXeKH — Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) February 8, 2018

“After orbiting the Earth for 6 hours, a third-stage burn-to-depletion was completed at approximately 02:30 UTC Feb 7, placing the dummy payload in a heliocentric orbit having a perihelion of 0.99 au and aphelion ~1.7 au.”

Perihelion means the spot closest to the sun, and aphelion is the farthest point. Since all orbits have the same basic elliptical shape, these data points can tell the shape of the path any spacecraft will take.

Plotting the course of something as small as a Tesla car is an exercise in mapping time as well as space.

The other useful data point is called the inclination, which is the angle of the spacecraft’s location relative to the Earth’s equator. Armed with this information, anyone can use the HORIZON tool to create orbital pathways and predictions.

Matching one track against the known paths other celestial bodies enables HORIZON users to know what else will be close by in the future. Currently more than 683,000 objects are available. The system catalogues all known solar system bodies and several dozen spacecraft already modeled for trajectory comparisons.

Using the JPL database, skywatchers now know the car will do an Earth flyby in 2026, 2031, 2039. “It might make a close approach (nominal 1.6 lunar distances, but with clear margins of uncertainty) to Earth in 2073,” says Langbroek.

Despite these calculations, there is still room for some surprises, as the JPL site notes. “Prediction errors could increase significantly over time due to unmodeled solar pressure, thermal radiation, or outgassing accelerations that are not characterized,” it says.

The JPL site also has information about this specific candy red spacecraft. Aside from the dummy behind the wheel, the vehicle has other interesting galactic stowaways, including:

"A Hot Wheels toy model Roadster on the car's dash with a mini-Starman inside. A data storage device placed inside the car contains a copy of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels. A plaque on the attachment fitting between the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the Tesla is etched with the names of more than 6,000 SpaceX employees.”

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