It's been a little more than four days since the Falcon Heavy rocket blasted into space at mind-blowing speeds - making it the world's most powerful rocket to successfully launch into the cosmos. The man behind this incredible project, Elon Musk, has hardly been able to contain his excitement at how the Space X initiative has performed.
His midnight cherry red Tesla is also now floating through the dark void with David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' playing and astronomers have managed to locate it as just a tiny dot in the vastness of space.
The spectacular photo was picked up by astronomers Gianluca Masi and Michael Schwartz, using data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Gianluca wrote on Virtual Telescope: "We slewed the scope where the JPL ephemerides placed the object and we found it there. So, we started capturing a few sequences of images.
"We immediately spotted the Tesla Roadster, quite bright, around mag. 15.5 and moving image after image across the stars. At the time of our observations, the car was at about 470.000 km from us."
They took 54 images of the Roadster trekking across space and compiled it into a short movie.
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Elon Musk expects the Roadster to be floating through space for millions, if not billions of years to come. However, there is concern about how long the car will actually survive in the deep recesses of space.
Funnily enough, the final burn of the rocket has proved so powerful, the car is heading closer to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
"Third burn successful. Exceeded Mars orbit and kept going to the Asteroid Belt," Musk wrote on Twitter.
That's leading to some people casting doubt on whether the Tesla will withstand a journey through the asteroid belt. While the huge chunks of space rock aren't as close together as Hollywood movies make them out to be, there is still the danger of it being smashed to smithereens.
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NASA astrophysicist Simon Porter wrote on Twitter: "So, this is probably unstable due to Jupiter on the decades timescale, not billions of years. But hey, first private spacecraft to the belt, beating the asteroid miners."
Sstronomers have been doing some calculations of their own, estimating the Roadster will likely survive for the next 10-12,000 years, which still isn't too bad.
Plenty of time for an alien spacecraft to come across it.
Featured Image Credit: Elon Musk/InstagramTopics: elon musk, Awesome, Rocket, News, Interesting, space