Starman — the dummy riding a cherry-red Tesla Roadster through space — has made his closest approach ever to Mars.

Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks space objects as a side project, found that Starman passed 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers) from Mars at 2:25 a.m.

That's about 19 times the distance from Earth to the moon, and 35 times closer than anyone on Earth has gotten to Mars.

(The closest recent approach between the two planets was 34.8 million miles (56 million km) in 2003, according to World Atlas, though the planets are often hundreds of millions of miles apart.).

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 pic.twitter.com/gV8barFTm7October 7, 2020.

No one can see the Falcon Heavy upper stage at its current distance.

The Roadster-bearing rocket stage is on an asymmetrical orbital course that takes it as far as 1.66 times Earth's distance from the sun at one end of its trek — out beyond the orbit of Mars — and then back within Earth's orbit at the other end, 0.99 times Earth's distance from the sun.

The stage has passed through the second aphelion of its 0.99 x 1.66 AU orbit and a couple of days ago passed back inside the orbit of Mars.