At this moment there is a vehicle of approximately 100 thousand dollars traveling about 13 thousand KM / h in the space destined for Mars, or not, after all it is not clear what direction it will take, but we will see it later.
Well, what matters is that right now, the Tesla Roadster - also known as the first payload to be put into orbit by the Falcon Heavy rocket - is pumping 40 meters every second that passes into deep space. The event that put the rocket into orbit - and also the Roadster - alone has once been a watershed of those that happen once every 5 decades and I can guarantee you one thing: if you're not excited about all this, it's because you do not understand very well what is happening. Here is a brief explanation of what I'm talking about .
But still, why have an electric car coupled in a rocket or what will happen to this car from now on, this little gadget will give you some things to think about.
Why send a car into space?
The first question that can arise when talking about having a car in space is: "WHY DOES A CAR IN SPACE?"
So, first we have to see the words of Elon himself: "The Heavy Falcon has 50/50 chances between exploding and working out." So no government or company in good conscience would trust a million dollar project or a study being developed years ago in a lottery like this. The chances of loss did not outweigh the opportunities for a free launch (even because it's easy to send something into space.) SpaceX's trademark is to make "almost free" releases compared to what it was charged until it entered the market in 2008 ).
And no one can say that Elon did not try to send something before sending one of his cars. Until he decided to send a Tesla car into space, his own electric car maker, he talked to NASA and the United States Army. No one wanted to take a chance.
Lifting without load would not make much sense, since the function of the rocket being tested is precisely being a large space freighter. The name already makes that clear: "Falcon Heavy", or "Heavy Falcon", since it is the largest rocket (in terms of cargo carried) to be placed in orbit. The vehicle has no more than 27 propulsion engines, capable of generating more than 2 million pounds of thrust (equivalent to 18 model 747 airplanes), enough to lift the rocket and its up to 63 tons of cargo.
Not being able to fly alone, Elon had the brilliant idea of adding another record to the SpaceX story. The company is already the first private company to put a rocket into orbit, the first to recover the launch vehicles to reuse them (to say only 2 made among the most impressive of the 10 "first company to ..." that the brand owns) is now also the first company in the world to put a car in space. The red car is the Red Planet, according to Musk's own words.
What can be cooler than that? I bet it was worth every dollar invested in research and development.
Where is the Tesla Roadster going now?
The mission was originally aimed at putting the sports car into the orbit of Mars. And if you're thinking that you've heard something about Musk-Mars before, you're correct and it all makes sense when viewed from a distance: The Iron Man has made it clear that the purpose of your life is to be known as the man who initiated colonization of the Red Planet.
So much of his plans eventually converge there. Falcon Heavy himself is already one of his experiments targeting Mars. Take stock of the required tonnage of equipment and everything else it will take to establish a base on the planet from scratch and then think about how many trips would be required to carry everything on a conventional rocket.
The "standard" rocket from SpaceX, for example Falcon 9, on missions to Mars would have a capacity of just over 4 tons of cargo. Falcon Heavy's capacity is 16 tons for the same destination (the further away, the less cargo can be transported). It would take at least four trips from an FN to take what the FH would take in one. Less expense and less wasted time.
But back to the launch of the Falcon Heavy, because it was the first time the rocket took off, something happened out of the blue: The thrusters were more powerful than expected and the launch ended up putting the cargo into orbit at a faster speed than the expected, thus diverting its trajectory and, consequently, final destination.
After a recalculation of route has been determined that the rocket is propelling the Tesla Roadster towards the region known as asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In the tweet below Elon shows what appears to be an approximate route after the bypass.
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It is not yet known whether the vehicle will be hit by asteroids or not, but according to Elon there is a small chance it will reach Mars.
Already the researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada decided they could not wait and decided to calculate the possible trajectory of the celestial body (yes, now Tesla is officially a celestial body recognized by the body that cares for catalog every object that wanders through space). According to them the calculations are only approximate, since the Tesla barely left the planet and there has not yet been enough time to demonstrate the trajectory for which it is inclined to go (accurate calculations would need a sample of hundreds of years of previous trajectory).
But even so some cool things could be discovered. According to them the Roadster will not last more than 10 million years wandering in space and that, in much less than that (from 1 million years), it could fall or Earth (6% chances of collision) or Venus (2% chance of collision). But do not worry about your possible offspring living on Earth at the time of a fall: If it had been whole by then (which we will soon see will not be possible) the Roadster would disintegrate the moment it started to orbit.
For those who want to follow the trajectory of the car in space was created this site where it is possible to see through charts and maps the dates and places of closest approach to Earth, where it is in space in real time, etc.
But as long as those 10 million years do not go by, you might be wondering if something more punctual can happen: Will the car burn with the heat emanating from the sun? Or will it melt the plastic parts? If you have this doubt, continue reading and see what I discovered after getting stuck with the same questions and go research on the subject.
What will NOT happen to him in space?
The first thing you have to think about is that the car is not like us, and therefore it would not suffer from the same problems that would a human drift in the vacuum . This has to do with our internal pressures like air of the lungs, blood being pumped, etc. Something a car does not have (much less an electric that has no liquid fuel running in its engine).
So things like pressure and vacuum are not a danger, but what about the sun? Why does not the sun make it turn a ball of fire instantly?
First we have to understand a basic thing about space and heat: There are 3 ways heat can dissipate according to physics:
Driving - When the heat passes from a warm part of the solid to the cold part. For example: Put one end of an iron bar in the heat and hold the other. Soon you will see the part where your hand starts to warm up;
Convection - Made through the movement of fluids, or, more easily: Through water or gases. An example is the hot steam coming out of a kettle the moment its contents boil;
Radiation - Finally, the ONLY means of propagating heat in a vacuum (hence the only one occurring in space and acting on the Tesla) and manifesting through electromagnetic waves. The most classic example is the sun itself warming the Earth.
So we can make an important initial note: The car will only be heated the moment it receives sunlight, which will not always occur and, when it does, will not reach the whole car at the same time.
With one part of the vehicle in the sun and another in the shade the heated side will distribute its heat through the driving generating a temperature balance. But then you can say - rightly so - that even if there is a balance it would not help to balance 5,000 degrees Celsius by the vehicle, but here is the key point: The sun does not have that heating power.
It seems strange, after all the sun is the hottest thing we know: Its core has a temperature of about 15 million degrees Celsius and its surface of 5 thousand, but here comes the questioning that, most of the time, we do not have about the sun: As strong as it may be in its power to generate heat, we must also think of ways to LOSE heat.
Come on: To start with we have the fact that the car has no heat itself. So it has 0ºC. To warm it you need an external agent like the Sun. Okay, that one we have. With the sun radiating the Tesla the heat enters on one side (side that takes light), migrates to the cooler side (shadow side) and then radiates to infinity and beyond. Without an atmosphere to hold the heat, the Tesla irradiation process is virtually instantaneous. In the same way that it enters from one side, almost at the same moment it leaves the other, not allowing a temperature accumulation.
Plus the car is still a convertible model, without a closed interior that can serve as a "simulated atmosphere" or anything of the sort. To illustrate this fact, let's think about the Moon. Similar to Tesla, it has no atmosphere and is there taking heat from one side, losing from another. Under these conditions its temperature ranges from 127 ° C to -173 ° C depending on the amount of sunlight it receives.
The second point to cling to the understanding of how the sun does not affect the Tesla is distance. Mercury is only 56 million kilometers from the sun and has a temperature of 425 ° C (which would not do much damage to a conventional car), now imagine the Roadster that is more or less 151 million kilometers. 3 times the distance, thus 3 times less heat received, that is, approximately 141ºC.
141 degrees Fahrenheit can not even melt plastic here on Earth depending on the exposure time, perhaps an automobile made of an iron alloy and super-resistant carbon in space.
A third reason to consider is the care of the Tesla engineers who are not fools or anything. If you look at the pictures of the car you will see that no space with air was left, as in the car's flashlights, for example. The move has the same reason they chose a convertible for the mission.
So since the sun will not end with the Tesla it means that it will be around forever? No. And as unlikely as it seems the most likely candidate to end the car is not a meteor or the power of a star, but rather something invisible.
What will happen to him in space?
What will destroy the car over time will be radiation. That's it. Even if the car has a bad luck and does not crash with an object large enough to destroy it or hit by small meteorites that can puncture it like termites in the wood, the radiation will end the sport.
Cosmic radiation is more powerful than we can imagine since we are accustomed to having here a powerful magnetic field and an efficient atmosphere that protects us (and protects Tesla Roadsters) from harmful waves emanating from the sun and other emitters (including radiation from of the Big Bang that is still around wandering and interacting with things).
In space the Tesla does not have any of these protections, of course. Which makes him quite vulnerable. In fact, any organic compound subject to such radiation would have the same purpose. And organic in this case are not only products of animal origin, as the leather of the fabrics, but in the sense of organic chemistry there in school, where everything containing carbon in its composition, then all the plastics of the car and even its carbon fiber frame, is something "organic".
According to William Carroll , a professor of chemistry at Indiana University, "[These materials] are made up largely of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds."
The energy of stellar radiation can cause the particles of the elements to move, their bonds "snap together," and the material becomes so brittle that it looks like the car is falling apart like a knife. "When you cut something with a knife, in the end, you're cutting off some chemical bonds," Carroll said.
But it will not be a knife cut, as a knife cuts these links in a straight line, while the radiation will divide them at random, making organic materials - from leather seats to rubber tires and a "short" space of time until your body in carbon fiber - in the long term - will literally crumble through space.
Anything hidden behind an inorganic shield (without carbon bonds) would last longer, although eventually even the plastic cloth on the glass windscreen of the convertible would discolor and separate.
Eventually, the Roadster would probably be reduced only to its inorganic parts: the aluminum frame, the internal metals and any glass parts that are not crushed by any impact space. (And as we said above, do not even think of the sun melting the glass.) That's absolutely impossible.