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STARMAN
Feb 7, 2018 15:52:12 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 7, 2018 15:52:12 GMT -6
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Post by auntym on Feb 7, 2018 22:47:37 GMT -6
www.space.com/39612-spacex-starman-tesla-roadster-live-views.htmlSee Views of SpaceX's Starman Riding a Tesla Roadster in Space!By Hanneke Weitering, Space.com Staff Writer February 6, 2018 video moves very slowly... Update for Feb. 7: SpaceX's live webcast of the Tesla Roadster and its Starman mannequin lasted for just over four hours after the Falcon Heavy's launch on Tuesday, Feb. 6. But you can see that full video stream here in the window above, courtesy of SpaceX. The Roadster and Starman now headed for the asteroid belt. Some lucky stargazers even spotted the Falcon Heavy second stage burn that sent them on their way! Our original story on the video feed, posted just after the launch, appears below. SpaceX's "Starman" dummy may have launched into space with today's maiden voyage of the Falcon Heavy rocket, but there's no need to say farewell to the lonely passenger just yet. Now you can virtually ride along with him in his cherry-red Tesla Roadster by tuning in to a live webcast beamed to Earth directly from the space car. Following the launch of the Falcon Heavy, the electric car and its dummy passenger were placed into orbit around the Earth. But in a few hours, the payload will be on its way into a solar orbit that will send it cruising by Mars.[In Photos: SpaceX's 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Test Launch Success!] According to Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, the car was blasting David Bowie's "Life on Mars" as it travels through the solar system. Musk also named the dummy "Starman" after another song by the late musician. Clad in SpaceX's new spacesuit, the dummy astronaut is casually drifting in space with his right hand on the steering wheel and left arm resting on the door. Along with great views of "Starman" and his roadster, you can see some spectacular views of Earth in the webcast. SpaceX's Starman mannequin is seen inside Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster in space, with the brilliant Earth in frame, in this jaw-dropping view from a camera on the car. SpaceX launched the mannequin and Roadster into space on the first Falcon Heavy test flight on Feb. 6, 2018, then beamed back live views from the car. Credit: SpaceXSpaceX has not yet said how long the live stream will last, but the Tesla's battery will only last for about 12 hours after liftoff, Musk said in a post-launch briefing at Kennedy Space Center. So the live views from Starman's vehicle should end sometime around 3:45 a.m. EST (0845 GMT) on Wednesday (Feb. 7). As with other SpaceX webcasts, a video recording will likely be available on SpaceX's YouTube page after the live stream ends. www.space.com/39612-spacex-starman-tesla-roadster-live-views.html
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Post by auntym on Feb 8, 2018 17:31:39 GMT -6
www.livescience.com/61688-flat-earthers-spacex-falcon-heavy-conspiracy.html Yup, Flat-Earthers Think the Falcon Heavy Launch Was a ConspiracyBy Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor February 7, 2018 A camera shows SpaceX's Starman mannequin and Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster as they fly above a ROUND Earth after launching on the first Falcon Heavy rocket test flight on Feb. 6, 2018. Credit: SpaceXYup, Flat-Earthers Think the Falcon Heavy Launch Was a Conspiracy A camera shows SpaceX's Starman mannequin and Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster as they fly above a ROUND Earth after launching on the first Falcon Heavy rocket test flight on Feb. 6, 2018. Credit: SpaceX Yesterday's successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket also sent an unusual payload into space: a cherry-red Tesla Roadster "manned" by a dummy named Starman and equipped with cameras that provided gorgeous views of Earth against the backdrop of space. But flat-Earthers aren't buying it. "People who believe that the Earth is a globe because 'they saw a car in space on the Internet' must be the new incarnation of 'It's true, I saw it on TV!' It's a poor argument," tweeted The Flat Earth Society, an organization dedicated to spreading the (incorrect) notion that the Earth is not round. "Why would we believe any privately held company to report the truth?" the organization added. Trust no one Flat-Earth conspiracy theorists have a long history of mistrusting the government when it comes to space. On forums devoted to the belief that the Earth is a flat disk, "NASA" often gets mocked as standing for "Never A Straight Answer," and astronauts' attempts to answer the common flat-Earth call of "show me the curve" are regularly dismissed as hoaxes and lies. Now, Elon Musk's private spaceflight company has apparently joined the ranks of the hoaxers and liars, the flat-Earthers say. On Twitter, flat-Earth accounts posted about "FakeX" and insisted that photos of Starman against a round Earth were Photoshopped. On Starman's live YouTube feed, chatters trolled one another with taunts about how the video proved flat-Earthers wrong, or was part of a vast conspiracy, depending on who was doing the trolling — flat-Earth opponents or believers. In the thread following The Flat Earth Society's tweet, the person in charge of the feed referred most challengers to the organization's Wiki page, where members posit that the planet is a flat disk with the North Pole at the center and an ice wall (what most people know as Antarctica) skirting the edge. Believe your eyes It's impossible to say how many people actually believe that the Earth is flat — especially online, where trolls and true believers are difficult to distinguish. The Flat Earth Society lists 555 members, and the organizer of a flat-Earth conference that took place in November 2017 in North Carolina told Live Science that about 500 people attended. Experts in conspiracy belief say that, despite their strange insistence on ignoring more than 2,000 years of scientific observation, flat-Earth theorists may be fairly similar to believers in other conspiracies: They tend to be drawn to these beliefs out of the sense of control and special knowledge they confer, and the believers tend to like black-and-white versions of the world in which clear "bad guys" try to pull the wool over the eyes of the "good guys." Some flat-Earth believers are motivated by their interpretations of the Bible as saying the Earth is flat. (The organizer of November's flat-Earth conference is a Christian creationist.) Others simply don't trust anything they can't see with their own eyes. There's a name for this, the Zetetic method,which holds personal sensory experiences above all other forms of information gathering. Starting from this mindset, nothing NASA or Musk releases can be considered trustworthy; only going into space to find the curve with one's own eyes counts. Unfortunately, that's not so easy to pull off. www.livescience.com/61688-flat-earthers-spacex-falcon-heavy-conspiracy.html
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Post by auntym on Feb 9, 2018 14:39:01 GMT -6
money.cnn.com/2018/02/09/technology/future/tesla-orbit-elon-musk-spacex/index.html?sr=twCNN020918future1142AMStory What happened to the Tesla that Elon Musk shot into space? VIDEO by Jackie Wattles @jackiewattles February 9, 2018: There were plenty of spectacular moments during the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket on Tuesday. But perhaps the most dramatic scene occurred about four minutes after liftoff: The second stage of the rocket, headed deeper into space, discarded the white nose cone at its tip. It revealed SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's cherry red sports car. Behind the wheel was a spacesuit-clad mannequin, named Starman. The car glided victoriously away from Earth as David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" blared on SpaceX's launch webcast. The car is not on some scientific voyage. This was a test launch, so SpaceX needed a dummy payload -- and Musk previously said he wanted it to be the " silliest thing we can imagine." So he picked his own luxurious Tesla roadster. "I love the thought of a car drifting apparently endlessly through space and perhaps being discovered by an alien race millions of years in the future," he said in December. Shortly after the launch, SpaceX posted a live feed of Starman's journey. The images looked as if they were plucked from science fiction. Starman is wearing one of the spacesuits SpaceX developed for its commercial crew partnership with NASA."I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, and you can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly," Musk said at a press conference Tuesday. "We have way better CGI (computer-generated imagery)" than that. The livestream, which was later viewed by millions of people, cut out after about four and a half hours when cameras' batteries died. Onlookers here on Earth moved on with their lives. But Starman and the Tesla are still out there, and late Tuesday the second-stage engine gave them a final boost, putting them on a path toward orbit around the sun. More than likely, they will remain drifting through the vacuum of space for generations to come. Astronomers have been hard at work pinning down exactly what path they will take. At first, Musk suggested on Twitter that the Tesla overshot its intended orbit and would fly out past Mars and into the asteroid belt. But now experts say that probably won't happen. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory got its hands on data from SpaceX on Wednesday, and it suggests the roadster will stay closer to the sun. The farthest it will go is about 250 million kilometers from the sun, or about as far as Mars. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says he also got a first-hand glimpse at the data and his analysis lines up with NASA's. The roadster will orbit around the sun in a path that takes it as far as Mars and as close as Earth.It'll reach its farthest point from the sun in November, and in September 2019, it will complete its first full loop around the sun. It'll continue to complete one full orbit about every 19 months. That's based on current projections, but things can always change. "The problem now is that it's kind of difficult to predict how the orbit will evolve," said Marco Langbroek, a space expert who tracks asteroids. He said forces like solar radiation can slowly bump the roadster toward a different course, or leftover gas in the second-stage rocket could give it another heave. By next week, astronomers say, the car will already be too far away from Earth to track with telescopes. So they're clamoring to get some good shots of the roadster now. Because of how the car's projected orbit aligns with Earth's orbit, astronomers on the ground probably won't be able to spot the roadster again until late in the 21st century. Based on calculations he made Thursday, Langbroek predicted that could happen in 2073. But in an email on Friday, he said it still seemed the car's path was "too ill defined to make reliable forecasts." At that point, "it's certainly possible that it will be mistaken for an asteroid," he said. Astronomers will eventually be able to figure out its a man made object, however, by observing its "orbit and behavior and brightness." And NASA says the roadster has been added to is "artificial object catalog" in an attempt to prevent this kind of confusion, according to Dwayne Brown, a senior communications official at NASA. McDowell, half jokingly, predicts astronomers won't have to worry about it at all. By the late century, he said, he imagines humans will have already colonized other planets in the solar system -- and Musk's "descendants will be able to drag [the roadster] back to a museum." WATCH VIDEO: money.cnn.com/2018/02/09/technology/future/tesla-orbit-elon-musk-spacex/index.html?sr=twCNN020918future1142AMStory
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STARMAN
Feb 9, 2018 15:07:50 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 9, 2018 15:07:50 GMT -6
gizmodo.com/nasa-has-officially-listed-musks-tesla-roadster-as-a-ce-1822843923 NASA Has Officially Listed Musk's Tesla Roadster As a Celestial Objectby Ryan F. Mandelbaum / kinja.com/ryanfmandelbaum2-8-2018 Image: SpaceX/Public Domain You may remember that, as a publicity stunt, SpaceX propelled a red Tesla, driven by a dummy in a spacesuit named Starman with the words “DON’T PANIC” written on the control panel, into space using its Falcon Heavy rocket. That car is now a permanent advertisement on the NASA HORIZONS directory of solar system bodies. Wanna see for yourself? Eric Holthaus over at Grist reported that you can just head over to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s HORIZONS web interface, click “change” next to the target body, type in “SpaceX,” hit enter, then click “Generate ephemeris.” You’ll find both the details about the Roadster, as well as its ephemeris, or its position in the sky. This is the same system that tracks all the other bodies in the Solar System, including satellites and, you know, Mars. But the page also reveals a secret: The car also has a Hot Wheels toy model with a mini-Starman inside and a copy of Isaac Asmiov’s Foundation novels on a storage drive. The car is now in an orbit that takes it between .99 and 1.7 astronomical units, where one astronomical unit is approximately the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On average, Mars is 1.5 au from the Sun. Along with coordinates, there’s a warning: “Prediction errors could increase significantly over time due to unmodeled solar presure [sic], thermal radiation, or outgassing accelerations that are not characterized.” Who knows, maybe in a few million years a hunk of irradiated metal might collide into the Earth as a mark of mythical hubris from an ancient species. Wouldn’t that be funny? gizmodo.com/nasa-has-officially-listed-musks-tesla-roadster-as-a-ce-1822843923
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STARMAN
Feb 21, 2018 15:54:25 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 21, 2018 15:54:25 GMT -6
www.space.com/39772-tesla-roadster-photographed-in-space.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social How We Know This Tiny Pinprick of Light Is the Tesla RoadsterBy Laura Geggel, Live Science Senior Writer / February 21, 2018 The two red lines show where the midnight-cherry Tesla Roadster is hurtling through outer space. Credit: Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope Project and Michael Schwartz/Tenagra Observatories See that unbelievably tiny speck of light? That's the Tesla Roadster and Starman, its steadfast mannequin driver, that SpaceX launched into our solar system about two weeks ago on Feb. 6. Starman and the Roadster were so remote — about 2.1 million miles (3.5 million kilometers) away from Earth — that it was challenging to get a good shot. But like any decent paparazzi, scientists tracked their target and captured an incredible image on Feb. 18. "Its apparent brightness is extremely low, 40 million times fainter than the Polaris star," Gianluca Masi, an astrophysicist, founder and director of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, which helped capture the photo, told Live Science in an email. [Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos] The image was assembled when Masi and his colleague — Michael Schwartz, the founder and president of Tenagra Observatories, in southern Arizona — took the average of 10 separate, 300-second exposures they got from a telescope at Tenagra Observatories, Masi wrote online. Details: When I took the images comprising this GIF animation (during the early morning hours of Feb 19th) the SpaceX Tesla was at a distance of 3.7 million km from Earth (a new record, of course!). Although it is was very dim (about magnitude 19.8) I wanted to try and capture it because it was close in the sky to a nice globular star cluster known as NGC 5694, which is in the upper left corner of the image. This cluster is much farther away than the Tesla Roadster, at a distance of about 115,000 light years from Earth. spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=142753&PHPSESSID=n7o000f27d2j9953dnfbm7n9f0The team members pinpointed the Roadster by relying on data from their own observations, as well as from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Minor Planet Center, which tracks minor bodies in the solar system, Masi said. Once they knew where to look for the car, they took a handful of images and averaged them to get a good signal-to-noise ratio. "These many images can also be used to see if the object is moving as expected across the stars, which is another great way to confirm the detection," Masi said. "In short, many images with the car in the expected position, showing it in motion across the stars as expected confirms it is a genuine detection." In fact, tracking the Roadster has become a hobby for Masi and Schwartz. They captured other images of the space-flying car on Feb. 8, just two days after SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket lifted it out of Earth's atmosphere. At the time of those photos, the Roadster was about 292,000 miles (470,000 km) away from Earth, Masi said. This GIF was created from images taken on Feb. 8, two days after the Roadster left Earth for outer space. Credit: Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope Project and Michael Schwartz/Tenagra ObservatoriesIt's remarkable how the dot of light captured on Feb. 8 looks much larger than the speck taken on Feb. 18. Soon, it will be so far away that researchers will need a 3.2-foot (1 meter) or larger telescope to see it, Masi said. "I must say, I was really excited to capture it, [even though] it is so faint now," Masi said. "We have been observing it every clear night, and this one was likely one of our final opportunities to see it." Original article on Live Science. www.space.com/39772-tesla-roadster-photographed-in-space.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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Post by auntym on Nov 4, 2018 12:55:34 GMT -6
www.space.com/42337-spacex-tesla-roadster-starman-beyond-mars.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social SpaceX's 'Starman' and Its Tesla Roadster Are Now Beyond MarsBy Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer / www.space.com/authors/?name=Mike%20Wall November 3, 2018 SpaceX's Starman mannequin is seen inside Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster with Earth in the background, shortly after launch on Feb. 6, 2018. As of Nov. 2, the duo were beyond the orbit of Mars. Credit: SpaceXStarman has put a lot of miles on his Tesla Roadster in the last nine months. The red electric car and its spacesuit-clad mannequin driver, which launched on the maiden mission of SpaceX's huge Falcon Heavy rocket in February, have made it beyond the orbit of Mars, company representatives said Friday night (Nov. 2). "Starman's current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe," SpaceX posted on Twitter Friday, along with an orbit diagram. [Epic SpaceX Road Trip Photos: Starman Rides a Tesla Roadster in Space] [img src="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/671865418701606912/HECw8AzK_normal.jpg" alt=" "] SpaceX ✔ Starman’s current location. Next stop, the restaurant at the end of the universe. 7:36 PM - Nov 2, 2018 Like many of us, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is a big "Hitchhiker's Guide" fan, as Starman's Roadster shows. The car's entertainment display was programmed to read "Don't Panic!" — the phrase that adorns the cover of the eponymous electronic guidebook in Adams' beloved series. "Starman" is a cultural reference as well; it's the title of a1972 song by David Bowie. And Musk said before launch that the Roadster would play Bowie's 1969 hit "Space Oddity" at full blast during its deep-space trek (though Starman cannot hear the famous tune in the airless void). Ultimately, Musk opted for Bowie's "Life on Mars" as parting music for Starman and the Tesla. Musk has said that he launched the Roadster and Starman because the duo is a lot more fun than the typical inert-mass dummy payload (pun intended; sorry). Launching a satellite or other valuable spacecraft wasn't an option, given the risks inherent in maiden flights. (Musk also runs Tesla, so publicity was probably a factor as well.) Starman and his ride — which once belonged to Musk — won't stay beyond Mars forever. As you can see in the diagram, the pair will loop back on their heliocentric orbit, eventually coming about as close to the sun as Earth does. The Roadster and Starman will come within a few hundred thousand kilometers of our planet in 2091, according to an orbit-modeling study. The authors of that study determined that the car will slam into either Venus or Earth, likely within the next few tens of millions of years. They give the space car a 6 percent chance of hitting Earth in the next 1 million years, and a 2.5 percent chance of smacking Venus in that span. [In Photos: SpaceX's 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Test Launch Success!] You can track the space mannequin and cosmic Tesla at whereisroadster.com, a website created by Ben Pearson, founder of Old Ham Media. www.whereisroadster.com/www.space.com/42337-spacex-tesla-roadster-starman-beyond-mars.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
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STARMAN
Feb 6, 2019 13:05:27 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 6, 2019 13:05:27 GMT -6
www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-still-orbiting-one-year-after-spacex-launch/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0b&linkId=63298147 Elon Musk Tesla still orbiting one year after SpaceX launch There's a Starman waiting in the sky. by Amanda Kooser / www.cnet.com/profiles/akooser/February 6, 2019 Starman goes for a ride in Elon Musk's space-Tesla. One year ago, on Feb. 6, SpaceX blasted a Falcon Heavy rocket into space and sent Elon Musk's personal Tesla roadster off on a journey through the cosmos to the tune of David Bowie's Space Oddity, with a spacesuit-wearing Starman dummy at the wheel. There's a lot about that last sentence that sounds insane, but it happened. The Where is Roadster? tracker shows the car on almost the opposite side of the sun from Earth as of Feb. 6, 2019. Where is Roadster screenshot by CNET Programmer Ben Pearson runs the Where is Roadster? website, dedicated to tracking the Tesla's trip around the sun. Let's check in to see the latest stats. According to Pearson's calculations as of Wednesday morning, the electric car is 226,423,581 miles (364,393,544 km) from Earth and 163,525,522 miles (263,168,899 km) from Mars. Getting humans to the Red Planet is one of Musk's goals for SpaceX's under-development Starship spacecraft, but the Roadster won't actually run into Mars. Good luck getting any repairs done on the Roadster. It's exceeded its original 36,000-mile warranty more than 13,000 times over. www.cnet.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-still-orbiting-one-year-after-spacex-launch/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0b&linkId=63298147
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STARMAN
Apr 11, 2019 13:31:55 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Apr 11, 2019 13:31:55 GMT -6
arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/starman-is-out-there-but-we-probably-wont-see-him-again-until-2047/ Starman is out there, but we probably won’t see him again until 2047 All future predictions had to be based on just seven weeks of high-quality data.by Ben Pearson / 4/10/2019 A launch-day photo of Starman leaving Earth's orbit. SpaceX A little more than a year ago, SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, complete with a mannequin nicknamed Starman, wearing a SpaceX Dragon spacesuit. About six hours later, the Falcon Heavy rocket's upper stage fired for a final time, sending Starman into an orbit around the Sun, with an aphelion just beyond the orbit of Mars. Since then I, and others, have wondered what the long-term fate of Starman will be. At first, not much was known about the Tesla's location. The first inkling of its orbital parameters came from an image that Musk tweeted. (Later, this turned out to be inaccurate). The first verified and publicly available location data came from the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), the US Air Force command tasked with tracking objects in space. But this only covered the time it was in Earth orbit, not Starman's position after the final upper-stage burn. Using those two pieces of information, on February 7, I created a website that allowed a person to see how far away the Tesla was from Earth. But this data was quite limited at first. The next bit of information came from JPL Horizons, a tool produced by JPL’s Solar System Dynamics organization that is tasked with tracking objects in the Solar System. On February 8, it used data provided directly from SpaceX to allow one with proper knowledge to query the system and determine exactly where Starman was at any given time. This provided useful information for a few months, but beyond that time period, the data simply could not provide enough information. Over the ensuing months, JPL received tracking data provided by optical telescopes that allowed it to refine the trajectory for Starman. Some people even used this early information to predict Starman’s long-term future; however, the data had a very short arc and was only really reliable for a few years at best. The best-known effort predicted that Starman would pass close to Earth in 2091 and resulted in a paper entitled “The Random Walk of Cars and Their Collision Probabilities with Planets." But that initial 2091 prediction was inaccurate because the tracking information relied on only a week’s worth of observational data. JPL Horizons produced its final solution at the end of March 2019. This came after the last known telescope to observe Starman, a one-meter instrument at Las Cumbres Observatory near Sutherland, South Africa, did so on March 19, 2019. After that time, all future predictions had to be based on just seven weeks of high-quality data. These predictions are made by taking the position in the sky of the observations and using that to fit a model of the orbital path around the Sun. With seven weeks of data, we can get a pretty good estimate of that path, and the current predictions have a calculated uncertainty of only a few kilometers. There are some consistent errors that show up when calculating such data, the most common being steady non-gravitational acceleration. This can be caused by the small, steady pressure of sunlight, differences in the temperature of different sides of the vehicle, and out-gassing. (Outgassing is an effect of sunlight boiling some of the non-metallic parts of the vehicle, which will cause a small pressure difference over time.) The measurements that have been made of Starman show that it is being pushed slightly away from the Sun. The data should be very accurate for about 50 years, but as it has close passes with planets, particularly Earth, that uncertainty will grow considerably. After 100 years it will be much less reliable. What we can say for now The next time Starman will pass close to a planet will be to Mars on October 7, 2020. This will not be a particularly close pass; it will be about 4.6 million miles (7.4 million km) away from Mars. At that distance, Mars will appear only as a tiny dot, as seen in this simulation. This will not be enough to significantly alter the orbit of the Tesla. Simulated view of Starman on October 7, 2020. Ben Pearson/ Where is Roadster 3D simulatorThere are many instruments at Mars—could any of them see Starman in 2020? The biggest telescope near Mars is the HiRISE instrument, which has occasionally imaged bright stars, and even Jupiter. However, it is not configured as an astronomical telescope and, due to its design, can only see bright objects, so it would not work to image Starman, which is predicted to be a magnitude 22 object as seen from Mars in 2020. A much closer pass will happen at Mars on April 22, 2035. The distance this time will only be about 1.4 million miles (2.3 million km), and has a small chance of being much closer. The predicted error is higher the further in time one goes, but at this point things are still accurate enough to be very confident it will be that close to Mars within three hours of the prediction. It is theoretically possible that a telescope could be placed on Mars by 2035 that will be able to observe Starman. A one-meter telescope, such as the South African telescope that last observed Starman, could easily do it. With so many new super-heavy rockets being planned, one of them could possibly carry such a payload to Mars by then. (It is worth noting that, in order to resolve more than a dot, Starman would have to make a pass within 37,000 miles (60,000km) of a telescope 10m (33 feet) in diameter. This is the size of the largest telescopes on Earth, so unless Starship starts flying by Starman as part of a Solar System cruise, we may never resolve the Tesla or Starman again.) How about the next Earth flyby? Close approaches to Earth are predicted to happen about every 30 to 35 years, often in pairs. The first of these close passes will occur on January 11, 2047. The distance is predicted to be about 3 million miles (4.8 million km), which is close enough that it can certainly be seen from Earth, about four times closer than the last reported observation of Starman from South Africa. These new observations should allow us enough data to better predict its journey throughout the Solar System for many hundreds of years to come. Starman will also make a second, slightly more distant pass in 2050. Simulated view of Starman on January 11, 2047. Ben Pearson/ Where is Roadster 3D simulatorAfter this point in time, measurements become much less certain. A very small error becomes a much larger one over so many years, and small errors are magnified by a huge margin when passing close to a body such as Earth. Furthermore, predictions are complicated by non-gravitational forces such as sunlight; we do not know how Starman is oriented, which will greatly influence this force. From 2050 to 2085, we know that Starman will be in the region between Earth and Mars, making a few distant flybys of Mars, but none particularly close, likely no closer than it will be in 2020. The next time it will be close to Earth is around January 1, 2085, but the predictions are much less certain that far out—it could be off by as many as four days in either direction. A second close approach will happen around March 9, 2088. Beyond this point we just don’t have much data, but the current predictions are for close approaches in 2119 and 2123 to Earth. Beyond this point in time, it is extremely difficult to know if a close approach will even happen at that time. During this entire period of time Starman is predicted to remain in roughly the same orbit, although there is a significant chance its orbit might start to reach out farther, maybe even reach the Asteroid Belt as Elon Musk initially stated. Beyond simply tracking cars roaming through deep space, this kind of analysis can be helpful in other ways. Tracking asteroids and comets is extremely important; if one were to hit the Earth it could cause tremendous amounts of damage. Using the same tools that were used to make these predictions, scientists and engineers can predict the path of near-Earth objects that might someday hit our planet. These objects, like Starman, cannot be seen continually, and thus we must predict their paths with limited data—sometimes for many years into the future. arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/starman-is-out-there-but-we-probably-wont-see-him-again-until-2047/
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STARMAN
Jul 4, 2019 15:47:10 GMT -6
Post by Deleted on Jul 4, 2019 15:47:10 GMT -6
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Post by auntym on Oct 8, 2020 0:49:14 GMT -6
SpaceX @spacex
Starman, last seen leaving Earth, made its first close approach with Mars today—within 0.05 astronomical units, or under 5 million miles, of the Red Planettwitter.com/SpaceX
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