Where's the Roadster? The globe now folds out into the Solar system
In February 2018 SpaceX launched the first Falcon Heavy. A brand new rocket usually carries a block of concrete as test weight. This one carried Elon Musk's own red Tesla Roadster, with a dummy in a spacesuit called Starman at the wheel. The car has been going round the Sun ever since.
The live globe now has a button for it: Where's the Roadster? Press it and the camera backs away from the Earth until the planet is a dot, then the view becomes the Solar system: the Sun, the eight planets with their orbits, the Moon next to the Earth, and the Roadster on its own red orbit. Press the button again and the camera flies back to the globe at the zoom you left it.
What the panel tells you
While the Solar system is on screen, a small panel shows live numbers for the car: how far it is from the Earth, from Mars and from the Sun, how fast it moves around the Sun, and how many trips round the Sun it has made since launch. Today it is about 95 million km from us, travelling at around 22 km/s, and it has gone round the Sun more than five and a half times.
Nobody has heard from the car since 2018. Its battery ran out a few hours after launch. So the position is calculated, not received: the orbit comes from NASA's JPL Horizons service, our server picks up fresh orbital elements once a week, and your browser works out where everything is every half second. The planets come from JPL's published approximate orbits, and the Moon from a short formula that gets its direction right to about a degree.
It is not to scale
If we drew the Solar system with real distances, the Earth would sit one pixel from the Sun and Neptune would be far off the screen. So directions are real, but distances from the Sun are squeezed and the planets are drawn much bigger than they should be. The Moon is also pushed out from the Earth so you can see it at all. The panel says this too.
You can drag to turn the view, scroll or pinch to zoom out as far as Neptune, and double-click to go back to the overview.
Why it is here
This one is a joke, like the Starlink layer we added earlier today. Our receivers hear aircraft and ships, not cars in deep space. But the globe is meant to be a place you open to look around, and a red sports car on its way past Mars is a good thing to look at. If you run an ADS-B or AIS receiver and want your own station on the globe, the setup is on the feeder page.