science

SpaceX launch: How Tesla roadster will be DESTROYED – where is Starman one year on?


Over the past 12 months, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, with Starman inside, has travelled more than 470 million miles around the sun. At the moment, the rocket is slowly making its way past Mars in an elliptical orbit. This is predicted to last around 557 Earth days, according to whereisroadster.com. 

But the website also says the roadster has exceeded the 36,000 mile warranty around 13,000 times over the past year.

The current warranty for a second-hand roadster is four years or 50,000 miles. 

This means Starman has gone over his warranty around 9,500 times during his travels so far.

Chemist William Carroll said the car’s leather seats and paintwork may have already started to wear away. 

He said to Live Science last year: “Those organics, in that environment, I wouldn’t give them a year.” 

The red car is exposed in the cosmos, so it will be hit with micrometeorites, solar radiation and cosmic rays.

These elements will eventually destroy the car as the tiny space rocks will dent the car.

The energy from the stellar radiation will also rip through the carbon-carbon bonds that make up the plastic and leather interiors of the car.

But even if the car and spaceman is stripped to the bone, it still could orbit the sun in a million years’ time. 

SpaceX even believes it could be travelling around the solar system in around one billion years. 

There are other theories about the demise of the roadster and Starman. 

A study was published last year in the preprint journal arXiv.org that said the car is likely to crash into Earth or Venus sometime over the next few tens of millions of years.

However, there is only a six percent chance that the car will hit Earth in the next one million years and a 2.5 percent chance it will collide with Venus too.



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