Last week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk launched his now-famous red Tesla Roadster into space, atop the first Falcon Heavy rocket. Cameras mounted on the car live-streamed the Starman’s journey for a few hours, giving us some unforgettable shots of Earth before going black. But if you want to know where the first car cruising our Solar System is right now, there’s a website for that — aptly called Whereisroadster.com.
The website was created by engineer Ben Pearson, who’s been passionate about space since he was in third grade. “I read every book in my little library that I could about space and space exploration stuff,” he tells The Verge. The day of the Falcon Heavy launch, he saw that people online were asking questions about tracking the Tesla Roadster in space. So he decided to figure it out — and create a website that gives the answer.
If you really want to know, the Roadster is now over 1.8 million miles (over 3 million kilometers) from Earth, according to Pearson’s website, which uses data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. At first, the car was supposed to go out to the orbit of Mars. But it actually overshot that trajectory, going slightly beyond the Red Planet’s path but not as far out as the asteroid belt, as Musk originally claimed.
After the launch, Pearson started modeling where the car could be in space, but his calculations didn’t match the orbit Musk had released. How did he feel when he found out he was right and Elon Musk was wrong? “I was just relieved to know that I wasn’t doing anything critically wrong,” Pearson says. “Elon Musk is a visionary man, incredibly far forward, but there’s a reality distortion field when it comes to him.”
Still, he’s a fan: “I like that he’s willing to take risks and do cool stuff that people just keep saying it’s not possible and he figures out a way to make it possible.”
Eventually, NASA released accurate information of where the Roadster is in the sky, so Pearson figured out a way to store the NASA data on his website to visualize where the car is in real time. Now you can track the Tesla’s orbit around the Sun, alongside the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the dwarf planet Ceres, on a map of our Solar System. You can also follow the car’s path around the Sun from today to almost the end of 2020, and check when the Roadster will be getting particularly close to Mars or the Earth.
One of the close passes to our planet will occur in 2091, Pearson says. And that would be a good time for “space enthusiasts” to go retrieve the Roadster, so that it can end up in a museum. At least that’s what Pearson believes will happen to the car in the long run. More likely, the Roadster is just going to keep floating around space — and maybe crash into the Earth, Venus, or the Sun within 10 million years.
