NASA Watches Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is to follow the journey of the 2008 Tesla Roadster which was shot into space on Feb. 6 along with the SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and his team decided to place Musk's cherry red Tesla Roadster sports car on top of the rocket as it was launched last Tuesday. Seemingly driving it was a mannequin in a spacesuit, which was named Starman.
The car was actually a dummy payload for the test launch done by SpaceX. While most payloads are inexpensive as they usually get damaged if a rocket blows up, Musk decided to go unconventional.
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"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," Musk said on Twitter in December.
While this was meant to be merely a silly act by Musk, NASA said it is necessary to track the car as it orbits around the solar system.
"We need to have it in our artificial object catalog so that we don't confuse it with an asteroid discovery in the future," said NASA spokesperson Dwayne Brown in an email shared by CNN.
NASA has labeled the Tesla Roadster as a Near-Earth Object, which stands for objects that travel relatively close to Earth. It is now also recorded in NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Horizons web-interface, a tool which can be used to navigate the solar system. Horizon watches over all celestial bodies of the solar system, and as of now, there are 150 man-made objects.
The Tesla Roadster is listed as under the name "SpaceX Roadster." With this, NASA's Solar System Dynamics group can now use the database to observe how the Tesla Roaster moves throughout space.
The last update for the Tesla Roadster reported that it is now flying towards Mars. According to the "Where is Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster with Starman?" website, the car is moving toward the planet at a speed of 43,868 miles per hour as of the writing.
