Elon Musk's car could return to Earth and fall to its surface with a probability of about 6% in the next million years, which is unlikely to happen in the coming decades, scientists say in an article published in the journal MNRAS.
“We already had all the software ready, and when we found out that the launch was successful, we decided to check what would happen to Tesla in the next millions of years. Even if the car falls to Earth, the inhabitants of the planet and Elon Musk should not worry about it - it will either completely burn out in the atmosphere, or only one of its parts will fall to the surface,”says Hanno Rein of the University of Toronto (Canada).
Last Wednesday, the first "space car" was sent into space - the Tesla sports car, owned by Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX. This machine was launched into Earth orbit and sent on an endless journey towards Mars and the asteroid belt aboard the experimental Falcon Heavy rocket, which made its first successful flight.
The entrepreneur's car was not empty - at the wheel was a mannequin named "Star Man" in honor of one of the songs from the fifth album of British rock musician David Bowie. When the sports car entered orbit, its passenger celebrated this accomplishment by playing two Bowie compositions, "Space Oddity" and "Life on Mars?", On the car's audio system.
As Musk initially believed, "Tesla" missed its target - Mars and went on a journey to the asteroid belt. Subsequently, scientists have shown that this is not so, and that the entrepreneur's car will indeed approach the red planet this year, but at the same time will not become its satellite.
Rein and his colleagues drew attention to the fact that such a trajectory of motion actually turned Tesla into another near-Earth asteroid that lives between the orbits of Mars, Earth and Venus and periodically approaches our planet and its closest neighbors.
Every day, dozens of small "heavenly stones" are burned in the Earth's atmosphere, prompting scientists to check whether Musk's sports car will suffer a similar fate and, if so, when to expect it.
Using a program developed to simulate the motion of near-Earth asteroids, Canadian astronomers have studied how Tesla's orbit will change in the near cosmic future and how it will be affected by the attraction of Jupiter, Mars, Earth and other large objects as they approach them.
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This computer model, as the scientists note, also took into account non-gravitational factors that could change the trajectory of the car, such as the Yarkovsky effect, orbital shift under the influence of uneven heating of its body by the rays of the Sun, which should have a particularly strong effect on the Musk sports car in comparison with asteroids.
When astronomers took into account all possible side factors, their calculations showed that Tesla could still return to Earth - the probability of its falling to the planet in the next million years is about 6%. In addition, there is a 2.5% chance that the first space machine will fall not to Earth, but to Venus.
In total, as calculations by Rein and his colleagues show, the machine will spend about 10 million years in space before it collides with some other object or burns up in the atmosphere of the planets. The first such chance will not appear very soon, in 2091, when the machine will first approach the Earth at a distance less than the distance between our planet and the Moon.