Names and faces

■ Three scientists who took a close look at the orbit of the red Tesla roadster that Elon Musk launched into space on Feb. 6 found there is a slight chance the car might crash into Earth or Venus sometime in the next million years. The chances are pretty small — somewhere around 6 percent for Earth and 2.5 percent for Venus. The results, due to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, were posted this week on the preprint site arXiv. The Tesla was launched into space Feb. 6 atop SpaceX’s vaunted Falcon Heavy rocket, its only passenger a spacesuit-wearing mannequin named “Starman.” Study authors Hanno Rein, Daniel Tamayo and David Vokrouhlicky, all experts in orbital dynamics, emphasize that it’s impossible to map out precisely where Starman will go as his vehicle floats through space. The roadster is currently drifting on an elliptical orbit around the sun that repeatedly crosses the path of Mars (though the two bodies are not predicted to collide). At its farthest, the car will be 1.67 times Earth’s distance from the sun. The roadster will experience its next close encounter with Earth in 2091 — the first of many, Rein and his colleagues say. With each successive flyby past Earth and other bodies in space, its orbit is perturbed and becomes harder to predict. ■ Jenna Morasca, a winner of the reality TV show Survivor, bit a police officer after she was found unconscious in the driver’s seat of her running parked car and was revived with the opioid overdose antidote drug Narcan, police said. A police report said the 37-yearold Morasca became combative during a Jan. 25 incident near a McDonald’s restaurant 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Police in South Strabane Township said she bit the officer on the right forearm while inside an ambulance during the incident, which is being investigated as a case of suspected driving under the influence. Morasca was the $1 million winner of Survivor: The Amazon in 2003 and later participated in a season of The Amazing Race. She did not return messages left at phone numbers linked to her. Police said her license plate reads “AMAZON.” The report said a passenger was found with syringes, there was no record of any charges against either the passenger or Morasca in court records.

Morasca

Musk