Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster Has a Close Encounter With Mars "Starman" gave the red planet a buzz during his epic space journey.
By Dan Bova
Elon Musk's Tesla roadster buzzed Mars on Wednesday.
The roadster, "piloted" by a mannequin dubbed Starman, was deployed into space by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket in 2018. This week, it came within 5 million miles of the red planet. That might not sound super close, but you have to keep in mind the scale of the solar system. It is currently 37 million miles from Earth.
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Starman has traveled nearly 1.3 billion miles and has completed approximately 1.7507 orbits around the Sun, according to the tracking website whereisroadster.com.
CNN reports that Starman could one day park itself (i.e. crash) back on Earth. But not anytime soon. A paper by Hanno Rein from the University of Toronto in Canada, calculates that the roadster has a 6% chance of crashing on Earth in the next million years.
