To get an idea of where the Tesla Roadster is going to spend the next few million years, you can use the SkySafari 6 app to display its orbit around the sun. Here's how. Search for the sun, and tap the Orbit icon. (It doesn't need to be daytime.) Pinch or expand the display until the orbits of the inner planets out to Mars are clearly shown. Next, open the Search menu, and type "Tesla." Select the Roadster, and its Object Info page will appear. Now tap Done. The current location of the Roadster and its orbit around the sun will appear, highlighted in green. If you don't see the Tesla's orbit, ensure that the app's Show Selected Object Orbit setting has been enabled. You can find the details about the Roadster's orbit on its Info page. The Roadster is orbiting the sun once every 571 days. The orbit's closest distance from the sun (shown in the app as the periapse value) is 0.986 astronomical unit. (One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — roughly 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). The orbit's closest distance from the sun, therefore, equals 91.66 million miles (147.5 million km) — close to the Earth's perihelion distance, or the closest Earth gets to the sun. The car will cross Earth's orbit every 19 months or so, but we won't always be there to meet it. More on that later. At the Roadster's farthest distance from the sun, known as its aphelion, the car will reach about 1.71 AU, or about 11 percent farther than Mars' mean orbital radius of 1.530 AU. At this distance, the car might encounter some main-belt asteroids. The asteroid designated 7 Iris has a similar perihelion but a much more elongated orbit than the planets have. Companies that are interested mining asteroids want to be able to deliver payloads that far from the sun. The Roadster's orbital inclination has a very small value of 1.1282, meaning it orbits nearly in the plane of our solar system. You can demonstrate this in SkySafari 6 by using one finger to rotate the 3D-rendered solar system. Will the Tesla Roadster return? Once you have the app set up to show the Roadster's orbit, you can open the Time control and run time forward or backward, continuously or stepping through in selected time increments, to see where the Roadster will go from here. To find out when the Roadster will next pass close to Mars or Earth, advance the date in the app month by month until planet and car symbols converge. The Roadster will cross Mars' orbit in early July 2018 and again in mid-April 2019, but the Red Planet will not be nearby. The Tesla will next cross Earth's orbit in early September 2019, but Earth will be on the opposite side of the sun. The left panel shows the search results after "Tesla" was typed into SkySafari's search bar. If the Roadster doesn't appear, try updating the app's minor-body catalog. On the right, the Tesla Roadster's Info page provides the rise, transit and setting times for your location, and the object's current orbital parameters.