4 years ago, SpaceX launched the "Falcon Heavy" rocket, which is the most powerful operational rocket in the world, on a scientific exploratory mission, but it was carrying the personal car of the head of the Tesla Electric Vehicle Company and the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
According to CNN, the cherry-red sports electric car is still present, and takes a single and rectangular orbital path around the sun, and is heading away towards the orbit of Mars, and at other times it becomes close to the Earth's orbit.
The car was used as a test payload for a Falcon Heavy test flight in February 2018 before becoming a satellite orbiting the sun, while a spacesuit-wearing doll named "Starman" is seated in the driver's seat.
As of Monday, the vehicle that has become a satellite is about 234 million miles from Earth and about 200 million miles from Mars, according to the whereisroadster tracking website, which uses NASA data to track the vehicle's path.
The astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Jonathan McDowell, explained that the car is probably still in one piece, but it is likely that it was attacked by some meteorites that were attacked during its journey in the vast universe.
Over the past four years, the car has traveled nearly two billion miles and completed about 2.6 revolutions around the sun, according to the site, which indicated that it sometimes gets close to other celestial bodies.
In 2020, the spacecraft reached its closest point to Mars, 5 million miles from the Red Planet, about 20 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
According to NASA data, the vehicle is not likely to pass close to another planet until 2035 when it veered toward Mars again, after which it will pass twice from Earth in 2047 and 2050.
One of the academic papers estimated that the chances of a car colliding with the Earth during the next fifteen million years reach about 22%, while the probability of it colliding with Venus or the Sun is 12%, and in this regard, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, Hano Ren, says that these are not possibilities. very high.
Because there is little scientific value in studying the trajectory of the car, astronomers are not very interested in pointing their high-powered telescopes in its direction to collect more data, Ren explained, noting that the last time the car was seen was in March 2018, about a month after its launch.
It is possible that the final fate of the Roadster will not be known for millions of years, but Musk had expressed in 2018 his hope that humans have already established settlements on other planets in the solar system, and that "Musk's descendants will be able to drag the car to the museum."