Here’s what will happen to the Tesla that SpaceX shot into space

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The Tesla Roadster that rode SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket into space Tuesday afternoon seems poised to overshoot its mark, with company CEO Elon Musk tweeting a diagram showing that the car’s current trajectory will take it beyond Mars and into the asteroid belt in its planned orbit around the sun.

But experts nonetheless predicted smooth sailing for the cherry red convertible and the spacesuit-wearing mannequin, Starman, positioned behind the wheel. Even in the asteroid belt, it seems the car is unlikely to encounter anything beyond ultraviolet radiation, cosmic rays and other highly charged particles, and the occasional micrometeroid.

Exposure to all of this “would be unhealthy for humans but will only very slowly degrade the Roadster and its rider,” Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, told NBC News MACH in an email. “Indeed, this car is surely destined to rack up billions of miles before disaster hits — if it does.”

Shostak said disaster could come in the form of a collision with Earth or Mars or possibly an asteroid. But he estimated that the spacefaring Roadster “has less chance of a collision each year than all the Roadsters plying the highways of Earth put together.”