I wondered about that.
The real forces that will tear the car apart over hundreds of millions of years in space, Carroll said, are solid objects and — most importantly — radiation. Even if the car avoids any major collisions, over very long time horizons, it's unlikely the vehicle could avoid the kind of collisions with micrometeorites that leave other space junk riddled with craters over time, Carroll said. But assuming those collisions don't completely tear the car apart, the radiation will.
"All of the organics will be subjected to degradation by the various kinds of radiation that you will run into there," Carroll said. Organics, in this case, doesn't mean the bits of the car that obviously came out of animals, like its leathers and fabrics. Instead, it includes all the plastics in the sportscar and even its carbon-fiber frame.
"[Those materials] are made up largely of carbon-carbon bonds and carbon-hydrogen bonds," Carroll said. The energy of stellar radiation can cause those bonds to snap. And that can cause the car to fall to bits as effectively as if it were attacked with a knife.
A knife cuts those bonds in a straight line. But radiation will split them at random, causing organic materials from the leather seats to the rubber tires to the paints to — given a long enough time span — perhaps even the carbon fiber body to discolor, flake, and splinter away into space. And under the harsh glare of the unshielded sun, Carroll said, that process could happen fast. "Those organics, in that environment, I wouldn't give them a year," he said.
https://www.livescience.com/61680-will-spacex-roadster-survive-in-space.html
Would make a cool time lapse video.
ReplyDelete