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Starman and his journey into deep space have completed their first round of the sun.
The model wearing a spacesuit, who is driving the red Tesla Roadster from SpaceX's founder and CEO, Elon Musk, was launched on February 6, 2018, the Inaugural flight of the massive Falcon Heavy rocket.
The duo has completed its first solar orbit this weekend, according to the tracking site whereisroadster.com. Starman and Tesla have an orbital period of about 557 Earth days, the website calculated, and have been in space for 560 days on Monday, August 19th.
pictures: Epic Journey on the SpaceX Road: Starman rides a Tesla roadster through space
At the launch, the Roadster radio was playing "Life on Mars" by David Bowie. If the car battery still works, Starman has now heard the song more than 150,000 times, according to the tracking site. And the site also provides other interesting information. For example, the Tesla has traveled more than 1.2 billion kilometers in space, which means that the car has exceeded its 36,000 km (58,000 km) warranty more than 21,000 times.
The first rocket flights are inherently risky, which is why SpaceX chose to place a dummy payload rather than a functional satellite when launching Falcon Heavy in February 2018. Musk said he had chosen Starman and the Roadster for fun, but the car was probably also used for marketing purposes. (Musk also uses Tesla, of course.)
Car and driver will probably do a lot more tricks around our star. Last year, an orbit modeling study calculated that the Roadster eventually snapping in Venus or the Earthprobably in the next few tens of millions of years. But the authors of the study have only a 6% chance that the Earth has an impact on the Earth and 2.5% on Venus.
the Falcon Heavy now has three takeoffs to his credit. Last April, the rocket pierced the Arabsat-6A communications satellite. And on June 25, a Heavy launched the STP-2 mission for the US Air Force, delivering about twenty payloads in orbit to various customers.
The two-stage Falcon Heavy consists of the first three modified stages of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The central booster is completed by a second stage and the payload.
Like the Falcon 9 and other SpaceX SpaceFight equipment, the Heavy is designed to be reusable. During the February 2018 test flight, the two-story first-floor boosters landed successfully, but not the central core. The flight last June had the same result. The first three stages landed successfully on the Arabsat-6A mission, but the central core, which landed on a ship at sea, tipped on the way back to port, suffering from rough seas.
June's STP-2 mission had a different milestone in terms of reusability – the first payload fairing jack of a boat equipped with a SpaceX net. The company has since taken a second downhill fairing and recently bought another boat to potentially double its success rate. (The payload fairings are the protective forward cones that surround the satellites at launch.The SpaceX fairings are supplied in two pieces, both of which have small steering thrusters and parafoils.Each boat can catch a half fairing. )
Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life, "Over there"(Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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