have any of my astrophotography friends attempted to capture images of elon musk’s tesla roadster as its orbit brings it near earth?

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun i dunno, if it was stored properly it would probably still be mint

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne well let's be honest, a mint tesla is still not in amazing shape, given the quality of fit and finish.

but let's assume it was driven.

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne anyway, the paint may not be looking too healthy but other than that, unless it's hit something, i wouldn't expect to see much. it almost certainly won't drive, but you won't be seeing that on a telescope...

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun they’re getting better, at least i don’t notice any major ones on this model 3 performance i got to replace the bolt (the US is in a standards transition and sadly tesla are the only ones ahead of it with immediate inventory in seattle).

but knowing tesla’s bad rep for panel gaps, i did myself a bit of a cheat, and bought a black one. this of course hides the panel gaps pretty well.

[dansup@mastodon.social]

@ariadne its too small to see for a few more years iirc

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun well yeah it won’t drive, they removed all the drive components before they launched the car

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne well what i meant by that is the computer will be fucked. but maybe they removed that too.

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun i think it was just the shell of the car and interior, the radio was replaced with a fake one with a hitchhikers guide reference so i assume they probably salvaged all the electronics just in case anyone needed to buy them

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne (i was quite surprised by how little cpu grunt the JWST has and how much the cpu cost so i had to go look it up and... yeah, computers really don't like radiation)

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne maybe they'll offer them as collectibles in the eventual firesale of all tesla assets

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@dysfun yeah without radiation hardening it only takes like 20-30 seconds to observe cpu state corruption in space.

learned about this the hard way when i was an SRE at a space startup and they cheaped out on their cubesat prototype

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne sure is expensive to not buy the expensive one sometimes, huh?

[bitsavers@oldbytes.space]

@ariadne

It wasn't Elmo's. It was promised to one of the REAL Tesla founders and Elmo being Elmo launched it into space.

[ariadne@social.treehouse.systems]

@bitsavers fair enough, but that isn’t the purpose of that post. i just want to see what happened to the car and the mannequin after being in space for 6 years