Interesting 'decay' - 'Starman' just zipped past Mars in his rapidly-decaying Tesla

from
https://www.livescience.com/starman-tesla-mars-approach.html

'Starman' just zipped past Mars in his rapidly-decaying Tesla Roadster
By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer 5 days ago

He probably doesn't look so pretty anymore.

Starman sent pictures home before leaving Earth orbit.
(Image: © SpaceX)
Starman — the dummy riding a cherry-red Tesla Roadster through space — 
has made his closest approach ever to Mars.

That electric convertible with its mannequin passenger bolted to the top 
of a Falcon Heavy rocket as a stunt during the SpaceX rocket's first 
test launch Feb, 6, 2018. (It's common for test launches to include 
heavy payloads, but they're usually more boring than cherry-red 
sportscars.) Two years later, the Falcon Heavy upper stage and the 
vehicle at its tip are making their second trip around the sun. Jonathan 
McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks space objects as a side 
project, found that Starman passed 4.6 million miles (7.4 million 
kilometers) from Mars at 2:25 a.m. EDT Oct. 7. That's about 19 times the 
distance from Earth to the moon, and 35 times closer than anyone on 
Earth has gotten to Mars.

(The closest recent approach between the two planets was 34.8 million 
miles (56 million km) in 2003, according to World Atlas, though the 
planets are often hundreds of millions of miles apart.)

No one can see the Falcon Heavy upper stage at its current distance. And 
the strange, beautiful images it once beamed home to Earth have long 
since ceased. But orbits over periods of a few years are fairly 
straightforward to predict, and McDowell used data about how the rocket 
was moving when it left Earth's gravity behind to pinpoint its recent 
movements.

The Roadster-bearing rocket stage is on an asymmetrical orbital course 
that takes it as far as 1.66 times Earth's distance from the sun at one 
end of its trek — out beyond the orbit of Mars — and then back within 
Earth's orbit at the other end, 0.99 times Earth's distance from the sun.

Last time Starman circled the sun, McDowell said, it crossed Mars' orbit 
while the Red Planet was quite far away. But this time the crossing 
lined up with a fairly close approach — though still not close enough to 
feel a strong tug of Martian gravity.

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At this point, if you were to go look at the Roadster, it probably would 
look pretty different. As Live Science reported in 2018, the harsh solar 
radiation environment between the planets would probably have wrecked 
all the exposed organic materials (red paint, rubber tires, leather 
seats and the like), breaking the carbon bonds that hold them together. 
And without Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetic shielding, even 
the robust plastics in the windshield and carbon fiber materials would 
start to disintegrate. Over the course of decades or centuries, the car 
should be reduced to its aluminum frame and sturdiest glass parts — 
assuming none of them get destroyed in impacts with passing space rocks.

Originally published on Live Science.

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