Over the past 9 months, Starman has laid many miles on his Tesla roadster. The red electric car and its driver (mannequin in a spacesuit), launched on the SpaceX large rocket Falcon Heavy from Ilona Mask in February, went beyond the orbit of Mars. This was reported by company representatives on November 2.
On the official stanitsa SapceX on Twitter, a message appeared: “The current Starman place. The next stop is a restaurant at the end of the universe. ” Note that here is a reference to the favorite novel by Ilona Mask “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”, written by Douglas Adams.
The mission has repeatedly shown that the founder and CEO of SpaceX, Ilon Musk, is considered a big fan of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”. The car's display was specially programmed to repeat the phrase “Don't panic” - it adorns the cover of the electronic guidebook for the first part of Adams' novel. Starman is also a cultural reference in a 1972 song to David Bowie. And the start was accompanied by the famous 1969 song “Space Oddity”.
Musk says he decided to launch such a duet for fun, since the typical payload seemed boring to him. The launch of a satellite or other valuable vehicle was not considered due to the risk.
Starman will not be able to stay near Mars forever. The diagram shows that the pair will return to their heliocentric orbit, approaching the sun, like Earth. The analysis shows that the couple will be located within a few hundred thousand kilometers from our planet in 2091. The car must crash into Venus or the Earth for several tens of millions of years. There is a 6% chance that the car will hit the Earth in the next million years and 2.5% hit Venus.
