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]

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

my assumption is that the roadster is probably in fairly bad shape by now from irradiation, since it’s been almost 7 years since it was launched into space

[dysfun@social.treehouse.systems]

@ariadne it'd be in fairly bad shape on 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