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Elon Musk’s Space Tesla Will Be Destroyed by Radiation

The Drive, BY KYLE CHEROMCHAFEBRUARY 7, 2018    Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Tesla Roadster. Its billion-year mission: To circle the sun, to hopefully not crash into Mars, to boldly go where no car has gone before.

That is, unless the cosmic radiation eats it first.

Elon Musk’s old Roadster became the first car in history to be blasted into space on Tuesday, riding the successful test launch of the Falcon Heavy mega rocket to an orbital path that’s projected to send it out to Mars—or maybe even further. In a tweet, Musk reported that the “third burn” procedure to push the Roadster out of Earth’s orbit worked a little too well, with the trajectory now slated to reach the edge of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Someone didn’t listen to C-3PO.)

But as Live Science reported, big space rocks aren’t really the most significant threat to the spacefaring sports car. No, that would be good ol’ radiation, which has the potential to mostly disintegrate the Tesla Roadster within a year or two, according to William Carroll, an Indiana University chemist and molecular expert. Without the protection afforded by the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, the Roadster will be bombarded by radiation that will eventually tear apart anything not made of metal on the car.

“All of the organics will be subjected to degradation by the various kinds of radiation that you will run into there,” Carroll said, noting that the term “organics” in this case includes not only fabric and leather but all plastic components as well as the car’s carbon fiber body. “Those organics, in that environment, I wouldn’t give them a year.”…….http://www.thedrive.com/news/18301/if-asteroids-dont-destroy-elon-musks-space-tesla-radiation-will-experts-say

February 9, 2018 - Posted by Christina MacPherson | technology, USA