It’s already happened once. A couple years ago some astronomer spotted a small asteroid with a high albedo (it was very reflective, brighter than normal).
Some Internet folks verified, and with a few more observations they were able to calculate its orbit.
Turns out the orbit matched that of the Tesla shot into space. The high albedo would make sense as the Tesla is still connected to the falcon 9 upper stage, which is painted all white.
Is that car in some kind of orbit, or did we just send it?
Heliocentric orbit like this:
More info:
That’s actually pretty cool. That thing might be forgot about and then found again 10,000 years from now
It’s already happened once. A couple years ago some astronomer spotted a small asteroid with a high albedo (it was very reflective, brighter than normal).
Some Internet folks verified, and with a few more observations they were able to calculate its orbit. Turns out the orbit matched that of the Tesla shot into space. The high albedo would make sense as the Tesla is still connected to the falcon 9 upper stage, which is painted all white.
You factor in that it’s SpaceX calculations. So an example could be between 10000 years or 10000 seconds.
Cargo space