Will the electric car Mask return from space to Earth?

Most recently, Ilon Musk and his company, SpaceX, attracted the attention of people from all over the world by sending a Tesla Roadster, which belonged to Mask, into space. Actually, the entrepreneur hoped for this - one must think that the flight of an electric vehicle in space is simply an excellent advertisement for both SpaceX and Tesla Inc.

Of course, the greatest achievement in all this fountain of success is that the heavy rocket carrier Falcon Heavy has flown into space. It is she who will be able to later send a man and his cargo into deep space - for example, to Mars. But many of those who followed the event itself are tormented by the question - what will happen to Tesla?

As for the near future, it has already been described by company representatives. “There will be enough batteries for about 12 hours of operation, this is the roughest estimate. After the batteries of the electric car sit down, the flight will continue in complete silence. Perhaps Tesla will "plow open spaces" of the solar system for millions or even billions of years. Maybe the car will be discovered by an alien civilization, which will find it difficult to understand why there is a clear ground vehicle in space, ” said Mask.

In a slightly more distant future, the car will begin to collapse under the influence of micrometeorites and cosmic radiation. According to experts, all organic substances used for the manufacture of the body and other elements of the electric vehicle in the open space will be exposed to hard radiation. It, in turn, leads to the destruction of carbon-carbon bonds between carbon and hydrogen. These connections degrade over time. That is why the carbon fiber frame of the car will begin to deteriorate first, after which the electric car will simply fall apart.

There is another opinion - some scientists believe that the machine will only be slightly affected by the effects of micrometeorites and other factors, and even after tens of millions of years Tesla will be one whole. If so, then there must be an orbit along which the electric vehicle is moving. And this orbit has already been calculated . Moreover, the calculation was taken for several million years into the future. Of course, the exact trajectory of movement for such a long time can not be calculated, but it is possible to determine the probability of the appearance of an electric vehicle in a particular region. As it turned out, there is even a chance of the car falling back to Earth. And the probability is completely non-zero - about 6%. If the machine does come back, it will completely burn in the atmosphere of the Earth (if there will be one after millions of years).

Hanno Raine of the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues regularly calculate the trajectories of the planets and exoplanets for a long time. "We have all the necessary software, and when we learned about what happened, we decided to see what would happen in our distant future." So we modeled the Tesla movement in the future.

Now the electric car is moving along an elongated orbit beyond Mars. Over time, the car will be increasingly influenced by the attraction of the sun, and the electric car will begin to return. All this is a very slow process, but still predictable. So, the Roadster will move in an elongated orbit, intersecting the orbits of Mars, Earth, and Venus until something happens to destroy the machine. This “something” could be the fall of the Roadster to Earth - the planet where it once appeared. If this does not happen, then the electric car will move in an orbit similar to that of many asteroids in the inner part of the solar system.

In any case, the electric car should soon appear near the Earth. "Soon" by cosmic standards, and not earthly. It will happen somewhere in 2091 - just at the end of the 21st century. As mentioned above, it is impossible to accurately predict the future of an electric vehicle, but it is possible to calculate it with a high degree of probability without problems.

Interestingly, the car was sent to space not because of the whim Mask. Initially, the leadership of SpaceX planned to negotiate with NASA or the US Air Force about sending into orbit any cargo of these organizations. As for NASA, the former deputy administrator of the agency, Lori Garver, said that the organization’s management considered Falcon Heavy to be a competitor to its super-heavy SLS rocket and decided to refuse to work together. In addition, representatives of the agency more than once skeptical about the rocket.