After 4 years of being sent into space by Elon Musk, what is the fate of the $100,000 Tesla Roadster now?

After 4 years of being launched into space, billionaire Elon Musk's Tesla convertible electric car has flown more than 3.2 billion km, completed about 2.6 laps around the Sun and is currently about 377 million km from Earth.

Lonely Journey in Space: What Happened to the Tesla That Elon Musk Launched into Space 4 Years Ago?

In 2018, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket was launched into space for the first time from Florida, USA. The 'world's most powerful rocket' at that time carried Elon Musk's Tesla electric car into space.

Behind the wheel of the Tesla Roadster sits a spacesuit-clad dummy named 'Starman'. Four years on, Starman is still floating in space, on a lonely orbit through the no-man's land around the Sun.

Starman dummy sitting on a Tesla Roadster. (Photo: nbcbayarea.com).

The Tesla convertible is not on a scientific mission, but a test launch. As of early February 2022, the car is about 377 million kilometers from Earth and about 322 million kilometers from Mars. The numbers were calculated by the website whereisroadster.com based on NASA data to track the Tesla.

The electric car is likely intact, but may have been hit by some meteorites during its ascent to space, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Over the past four years, the Tesla has traveled more than 2 billion miles and completed about 2.6 orbits around the Sun. The car's journey has been largely through the barren, empty vacuum of space.

But sometimes the electric vehicle will get pretty close to other celestial bodies. In 2020, the vehicle made its first close approach to Mars, coming within 8 million kilometers of it—20 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

According to NASA data, Starman won't get close to another planet until 2035, when the vehicle will make another 'meeting' with Mars. After that, the electric vehicle will make two 'meetings' with Earth in 2047 and 2050, at a distance of just a few million kilometers.

One study estimated the chances of the Tesla colliding with Earth in the next 15 million years to be about 22%. Meanwhile, the chances of hitting Venus or the Sun are 12%.

According to Hanno Rein, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Toronto who co-authored the paper, the probability of such a collision is not very high.

It is difficult to determine exactly which path the Tesla will travel on. (Photo: nbcbayarea.com).

In fact, space travel is inherently complex and unpredictable. Therefore, determining the exact path that the Tesla will travel is very difficult . Professor Rein said that because studying the trajectory of this vehicle does not have much scientific value, experts are not too close in using high-power telescopes to track and collect more data. The Tesla was last observed in March 2018, about a month after being launched into space.

If a Tesla electric car crashes while in motion and actually hits Earth, the best-case scenario is that it will burn up on contact with the planet's thick atmosphere. (Space objects hitting Earth are fairly common, and typically burn up in the atmosphere. Such impacts rarely affect populated areas.)

Humans probably won't know the final fate of Starman and the Tesla for millions of years. But for his part, Elon Musk shared in 2018 that he hopes humans will establish settlements on other planets in the solar system and that 'Musk's descendants can tow the car back and put it in a museum somewhere'.