Starman poised to make a flaming renetry!

The Tesla Roadster and its driver, a mannequin named Starman were launched on the maiden flight of SpaceX's huge Falcon Heavy rocket just last week. The car is currently looping around the sun on an elliptical orbit that takes it a little beyond Mars at its farthest point, and back to Earth's orbital distance at its closest.

A team of researchers with time on their hands wanted to know the Roadster's ultimate fate, so they performed a series of computer simulations tracking the car's path through the solar system over the next 3 million years.

"Although we are not able to tell on which planet the car will ultimately end up, we’re comfortable saying it won’t survive in space for more than a few tens of millions of years," lead author Hanno Rein, director of the University of Toronto Scarborough's Center for Planetary Science, said in a statement.

When that happens, most or all of the Tesla will burn up in the atmosphere, team members said. As all the uncertainty suggests, the orbits of small objects like electric cars are tough to project so far into the future. The Tesla will have many gravitational encounters with Earth over the eons, for example, and it's unclear just how these will shape its trek through space.

"Depending on the details of these encounters, the Tesla can be kicked onto a wider or smaller orbit, so it’s random," study co-author Dan Tamayo, also of the University of Toronto Scarborough, said in the same statement. "Over time, the orbit will undergo what’s called a random walk, similar to the fluctuations we see in the stock market, that will allow it to wander the inner solar system."

The researchers also determined that the space Tesla will make a relatively close pass by Earth in 2091, coming within a few hundred thousand kilometers of the planet.

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After reading that factual post from Fox News, I immediately called the Capitol and tried to get Nancy P. on the phone. I wanted to tell her that this pending crash just might be the fear angle they're looking for to push them over the top in 2020. I even prepared a statement for her;

'Attention fellow US citizens (and voting illegal aliens). It has come to my attention that the money you taxpayers wasted on that rocket with the car will come back to haunt us, over time. However, urgent calls to my friends across the isle resulted in many abrupt hangups! This kind of total disregard for tax paying Americans [as well as free loading illegals] can not be tolerated! At some point, in time, a big chunk of flaming debris could well impact out fragile planet and cause who knows what damage! This is just one more reason we need your vote in 2020!'