An electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry has created a website to follow Tesla's roadster, Elon Musk - the car attached to SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket - that zooms into space. SpaceX fan Ben Pearson created the "Where is Roadster" website that uses data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons to track the progress of the car and its dummy driver "Starman" in space, reported Sunday TechCrunch. The site would also predict the way of the car and let people know when it would be close to meet various planets and the sun.
The platform would even indicate the current position of the Roadster as well as its speed and whether it was moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at some point. The site is not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, Musk has taken note of it on Twitter.
"I'm sure he's parked somewhere here http://whereisroadster.com, Musk, the CEO of SpcaeX, tweeted late Sunday.
Originally, the car was to be inserted into an orbit that would fly closer to Mars, but the third combustion of the engine on the Falcon Heavy's upper stage "exceeded" that orbit, sending the car into deep space.
Currently, the Roadster is still much closer to Earth - at 2.25 million miles - than Mars, 137.5 million miles away, Fortune reported.
"Meanwhile, Mars is also moving, so when the Roadster intersects its orbit for the first time in July, the planet itself will already be millions of miles away," the report says.
After that, the Roadster will actually return to something near Earth's orbit, though, again, the Earth itself will not be anywhere near.
According to the site's data, the Roadster will not be close to Mars until early October 2020. The car does not have landing gear or propellers to land on the surface.
Earlier in February, the virtual telescope project at the Tenagra Observatory in Arizona captured the car moving in the night sky.
Gianluca Masi of the virtual telescope project and Michael Schwartz of the Tenagra Observatory were able to locate the car using data generated by the Solar Systems Dynamics Laboratory at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The project said the Tesla was "pretty bright".
