Starman got under 5 million miles from the Red Planet.

Starman just traveled by Mars for the first time.

The spacesuit-clad mannequin is “driving” SpaceX author and CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, which dispatched in February 2018 on the debut flight of the company’s incredible Falcon Heavy rocket. What’s more, the team simply hit a major achievement on their cosmic excursion.

“Starman, last seen leaving Earth, made its first close approach with Mars today — within 0.05 astronomical units, or under 5 million miles, of the Red Planet,” SpaceX reported by means of Twitter Wednesday (Oct. 7). (One astronomical unit is the normal Earth-sun distance — around 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)

Starman and the Roadster circle the sun once every 557 Earth days, as per the following site whereisroadster.com. Starting today, vehicle and driver have secured almost 1.3 billion miles (2.1 billion km) in space — far enough to drive the entirety of the streets on Earth in excess of multiple times over, whereisroadster.com determined.

Also, the pair will likely pile on much more space miles before they’re finished.

The Roadster will inevitably barrel into either Venus or Earth, likely inside the following not many a huge number of years, a 2018 orbit-modeling study decided . Yet, the odds of an Earth or Venus sway in the following million years are simply 6% and 2.5%, separately.

Debut launches of new rockets are unsafe things, which discloses why SpaceX chose to put Starman and the Roadster on board the main Falcon Heavy takeoff as a dummy payload.

Advertising may have been another factor, obviously; Musk additionally runs Tesla, a main electric-vehicle maker.

The Falcon Heavy has since dispatched two additional missions, them two operational flights. The supporter flung the correspondences satellite Arabsat-6A in April 2019 and conveyed two dozen payloads to orbit for an assortment of clients two months later.