Now in an elliptical orbit around the sun, the Tesla Roadster launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Tuesday during the powerful booster's maiden flight was expected to pass beyond the moon's orbit overnight Wednesday and reach the orbit of Mars in July as it puts Earth in its rear view mirror, analysts said. While SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk has said he likes to imagine the Tesla remaining in orbit for hundreds of millions of years or more, Jupiter's orbit is likely to fling it back to the solar system long before then.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a noted space analyst, says two forces acting on the car will limit its lifetime.
One is Jupiter. The giant planet's gravity perturbs bodies in the asteroid belt and, over time, will have an effect on the Tesla's trajectory. The other effect is a subtle acceleration produced by tiny temperature-related forces over extremely long periods that also would act to change the orbit.
"It's tiny, but over timescales of millions of years it's enough to shrink the orbit and make the thing fall into the sun," McDowell said. "So it's a race between does that happen before some Jupiter perturbation ejects it from the system.
"On timescales of centuries, it's going to be pretty much in the orbit it's in now. On timescales of thousands of years, it's going to be in a not-horribly-different orbit, but Jupiter will mess it around some. And then on timescales of millions of years, it won't be there anymore."
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Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a noted space analyst, says two forces acting on the car will limit its lifetime.
One is Jupiter. The giant planet's gravity perturbs bodies in the asteroid belt and, over time, will have an effect on the Tesla's trajectory. The other effect is a subtle acceleration produced by tiny temperature-related forces over extremely long periods that also would act to change the orbit.
"It's tiny, but over timescales of millions of years it's enough to shrink the orbit and make the thing fall into the sun," McDowell said. "So it's a race between does that happen before some Jupiter perturbation ejects it from the system.
"On timescales of centuries, it's going to be pretty much in the orbit it's in now. On timescales of thousands of years, it's going to be in a not-horribly-different orbit, but Jupiter will mess it around some. And then on timescales of millions of years, it won't be there anymore."
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