While you may not remember where you parked your car, you can now find out the location of the Tesla Elon Musk launched into space.
An electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, Ben Pearson created a website Where Is Roadster to track the sporty red Tesla Roadster and its mannequin-driver Starman.
Pearson set up the site to answer several questions including, "How do I find out how far Falcon Heavy's Starman is from earth right now?", "Current position of Starman" and "How close will the Tesla Roadster with Starman actually get to Mars?".
"These questions had me thinking about the subject. I came to realise that people really were interested in tracking these objects," he said.
Initially he used two-line element sets and information from Musk's tweets to estimate the car's location, and later obtained more accurate estimates using data from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The site keeps a dynamic estimate of where the car is relative to Earth and Mars, how fast it is travelling and the distance it has covered.
To give viewers some context, Pearson tracks distance in multiplicative of the Tesla's 36,000 mile warranty.
At time of writing, the car has exceeded said warranty by 608 times (that's some 35,228,151km worth of driving).
Though not affiliated with SpaceX, the site did catch the attention of its CEO.
"I’m sure it’s parked around here somewhere … http://whereisroadster.com," Musk tweeted.
On Feb 6, SpaceX launched its most powerful rocket yet, the Falcon Heavy.
The rocket contained a red Tesla Roadster sports car with built-in cameras, "driven" by a mannequin dubbed Starman with a copy of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi series Foundation, and a plaque engraved with 6,000 SpaceX employee names.
An electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, Ben Pearson created a website Where Is Roadster to track the sporty red Tesla Roadster and its mannequin-driver Starman.
Pearson set up the site to answer several questions including, "How do I find out how far Falcon Heavy's Starman is from earth right now?", "Current position of Starman" and "How close will the Tesla Roadster with Starman actually get to Mars?".
"These questions had me thinking about the subject. I came to realise that people really were interested in tracking these objects," he said.
Initially he used two-line element sets and information from Musk's tweets to estimate the car's location, and later obtained more accurate estimates using data from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The site keeps a dynamic estimate of where the car is relative to Earth and Mars, how fast it is travelling and the distance it has covered.
To give viewers some context, Pearson tracks distance in multiplicative of the Tesla's 36,000 mile warranty.
At time of writing, the car has exceeded said warranty by 608 times (that's some 35,228,151km worth of driving).
Though not affiliated with SpaceX, the site did catch the attention of its CEO.
"I’m sure it’s parked around here somewhere … http://whereisroadster.com," Musk tweeted.
On Feb 6, SpaceX launched its most powerful rocket yet, the Falcon Heavy.
The rocket contained a red Tesla Roadster sports car with built-in cameras, "driven" by a mannequin dubbed Starman with a copy of Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi series Foundation, and a plaque engraved with 6,000 SpaceX employee names.
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