SpaceX posted a tweet about the current location of the Starman and red Roadster which were carried by the Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this year. The tweet has confirmed that the spacecraft is now miles and miles away from its home planet. This is so far the greatest distances from the Sun, and the team is hoping that Starman should reach its far point at 155 million miles on 8th November. The tweet from SpaceX stated, “Starman’s current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe.” The second statement in the tweet refers to the second novel in The Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy series which was penned down by the great author Douglas Adams.
Starman’s current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe. pic.twitter.com/Ty5m8IjJpE
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 3, 2018
The sentence of the tweet showcases that the CEO of SpaceX is a big fan of the writer’s work. The novel series consists of five books namely; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless. These books were released from 1979 to 1992. On September 2008, an announcement was made that a sixth book of the series will be published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the original novel release. The sixth book was named ‘And Another Thing’ and was written by Elen Colfer. It came out in October 2009.
According to Ben Pearson, who put the tracking of Starman and Roadster on the website called WhereIsRoadster.com,The Starman and Roadster will not be able to make anywhere near Neptune until November 2020. Its distance from Earth will be nearly 32 million miles away. Ben Pearson models also point out that the mannequin will be around 4.6 million miles away from Mars on 6th October 2020. The dummy might not be in close vicinity to home until 2091. A team of researchers who were curious to know the date of the red electric car and its dummy driver performed a series of continuous computer simulations. They have tracked and estimated the path of the car through the next 3 million years in the solar system.
The orbit modelling survey showed that the chances of Tesla Roadster crashing into the Earth and Venus are approximately 6 and 2.5% respectively, in the next 1 million years. Starman seems to be enjoying the cosmic journey and should hope to see both of them safe and sound in a few decades.