Nearly four years on from the iconic launch of Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster into space on SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, the vehicle has almost travelled 2 billion miles in space. That's more than 3,202,943,800 km.
The car is currently closer to Mars than it is earth, and is travelling towards Mars at a rate of 28,682kmh.
You can track the car's movements on the WhereisRoadster? website, which was launched shortly after the vehicle was fired into space. It has a live update feed directly from NASA.
The car has completed more than 2.6 orbits of the sun and has travelled far enough to have driven all of the world's roads 49.5 times.
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Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the Tesla is probably still in one piece, but it's likely that it's seen some damage from meteor strikes.
Interestingly, astronomers haven’t actually observed the Roadster with their telescopes since March 2018. But this is likely due to the fact that astronomers have better things to do with their time, with Hanno Rein, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Toronto, saying there simply isn’t much scientific value in studying its trajectory.
After all, it's just an expensive piece of space junk at the end of the day.
In 2020, Tesla got pretty close to Mars, coming within just 8 million km of the red planet. It's not expected to get that close to another planet until 2035.
A few days after the car was launched into space, a paper was published by Rein through Cornell University which stated that there's a 22% chance the Tesla could collide with Earth within the next 15 million years.
