1. Tesla In Orbit
2. Tesla In Orbit Images

In February of 2018, Elon Musk launched his personal Tesla Roadster into space on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. A little more than a year later, the Roadster. Manuel Bojorquez reports on historic launch using new Falcon rocket with special payload (2-6-2018). View from SpaceX Launch Control. Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth.

In this handout photo provided by SpaceX in February 2018, a Tesla Roadster launched from the Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy driver named “Starman” heads toward Mars. SpaceX via Getty Images

Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX successfully launched its first Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful in the world, into space with Musk’s personal 2008 Tesla Roadster on board. To make the launch more fun, Musk put a spacesuit-clad dummy named “Starman” in the driver’s seat of the Roadster and had him listen to endless loops of David Bowie’s Space Oddity during the journey.

Since then, Starman has spent more than 550 days in outer space. According to WhereIsRoadster.com, an independent site tracking the electric car’s real-time location, the vehicle had completed its first orbit around the sun by Sunday, traveling nearly 763 million miles since last year’s launch.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk Wants to ‘Nuke Mars’ for Humans to Live

“If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity151,881 times since he launched,” the tracking site says. But that’s not very likely, because Tesla’s battery would only last for about 12 hours after liftoff, Musk said at the Falcon Heavy’s post-launch briefing at Kennedy Space Center last year.

The Starman’s current location is about 185 million miles from Earth, according to the tracking site. To be able to see it from here, one would need a telescope with a diameter of at least 43,823 feet.

The cherry-red Roadster was originally sent on a path toward Mars’ orbit. Because of the car’s unsterile condition, planetary scientists had worried about bacterial contamination once it crashed into the red planet, which would muddle scientific efforts to search for life on Mars.

But a later calculation by University of Toronto astrophysicist Hanno Rein estimated that the Roadster would more likely crash into Earth, Venus or the sun—in as soon as 10 million years.

As predicted by that calculation, last November, Starman passed the Mars orbit and drifted further into the solar system toward the asteroid belt.

The car is currently moving away from Earth at a speed of about 988 miles per hour, per WhereIsRoadster.com. It will fly near Mars again on October 7 next year and come relatively close to Earth every 30 years.

Rein’s study suggests that we may even get a telescopic glimpse of the Roadster within 100 years if the car flies within one Earth-moon distance.

After its third Earth flyby, the Roadster’s path will get increasingly chaotic and unpredictable due to Earth’s gravitational tug that will cause small changes in some of the car’s orbital parameters every time it comes close.

Consumer Reports reported Thursday that its engineers 'easily tricked' a Tesla(NASDAQ: TSLA) Model Y into driving on Autopilot, without an operator behind the wheel. The driver assistance feature enables to car to steer, accelerate, and brake automatically, while staying within its lane of traffic. On its website, Tesla insists that 'current Autopilot features require active driver supervision.' While the Autopilot feature is designed to ensure that an operator is in the driver's seat with their hands on the steering wheel and to disengage if the operator isn't detected, but according to Consumer Reports, the existing safeguards in place are insufficient.

This report comes following a fiery crash in Texas earlier this week that resulted in two fatalities. Authorities reported that no one was in the driver's seat at the time of the accident. CEO Elon Musk said in a post on Twitter, 'Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled.' He went on to say that standard Autopilot requires lane lines in order to activate, something the street didn't have. Federal authorities continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Texas crash.

Consumer Reports said it was able to create a scenario that fooled a Tesla Model Y into believing that someone was behind the wheel by using a small, weighted chain hanging from the steering wheel to 'simulate the weight of a driver's hand,' which fooled the vehicle systems into believing someone was in the driver's seat.

Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports senior director of auto testing, said, 'It was a bit frightening when we realized how easy it was to defeat the safeguards, which we proved were clearly insufficient.'

Tesla has long contended that the Autopilot feature doesn't provide fully self-driving capability. While the cars are equipped with the hardware necessary for future autonomous driving, this will depend on 'achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers ... as well as regulatory approval.' This hasn't stopped some drivers from pushing the limits of the system, sometimes with dire consequences.

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Tesla In Orbit

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Danny Vena owns shares of Tesla. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Tesla and Twitter. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.