How will it take in months or years to travel from the earth to mars (one way only) by a typical spacecraft?

Question

What about other planets like moon, mercury, venus, jupiter, ..etc. (one way only).

Answer 1

It generally takes 6-9 months. Please read the book:"The Case for Mars" by Dr. Robert Zubrin, PhD for a down to Earth nuts and bolts scientific discussion of how to put men on Mars, written for the layman. If you have any desire to learn about the future of mankind, this is it.

Answer 2

Well, Mars is at its closest 35 million miles from Earth. That is pretty good walking distance. Lets say that Mars was sitting still and so was Earth. If we hit escape velocity of 25,000 mph and keep that speed all the way , it would take about 60 days to get there. If we could go faster, it would be less time, but that means more acceleration which means more fuel, which means bigger rocket, which means more acceleration. Its a vicious cycle. In reality, we would probably have to go slower than 25,000 mph during the trip.

That is a perfect universe situation. What is really happening, Earth and Mars are both moving. We have to launch the vehicle at a certain point so that it can catch up with the Mars orbit while overcoming the movement from the Earth orbit. There are only certain times of the year where this is feasable because of where we sit in our orbits. A fun way to illustrate this point is to get on a merry go round and get it spinning and have another person running around it at a different speed as it spins and try to throw a ball to that person. It is a lot harder than it sounds, especially if there is much distance between the two people. To get to Mars, we cannot follow a straight line to get there. It will be a curved one, which will add time to the flight.

Conventional rocketry will allow for the trip to take 11 months or so to get there. There are experimental designs that may lessen the trip. The VASIMR rocket could possibly get to Mars in 39 days. You have to keep in mind that this is still theoretical technology.

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/vasimr_rocket_020807-1.html

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/travelinginspace/future_propulsion.html

(This one is a powerpoint, but is informative)
http://web.mit.edu/mars/Conference_Archives/MarsWeek04_April/Speaker_Documents/VASIMREngine-TimGlover.pdf

Answer 3

I've heard 3 to 9 months for Mars - it depends on how fast your spacecraft travels (obviously) and also how close Earth and Mars are at the time. Since all the planets are moving all the time, you have to take their positions into account.

There's a spacecraft en route to Mercury right now (unmanned, of course) named Messenger. It left Earth in August 2004, and won't get to Mercury until 2011! It turns out it's very hard to send a space craft in towards the Sun - you have to get it to go very fast at first to escape Earth's gravity, but then you have to get it to slow down (in its orbit around the Sun) to get to Mercury. So this space craft is actually making a few loops around Venus first before heading to Mercury.

Sending spacecraft to the outer solar system can be hard, too, because the outer planets are so far away. The Voyager (and pioneer, too, I think) spacecrafts were helped out by using Jupiter as a gravitational sling shot to speed them up. There's a spacecraft headed to Pluto that's the fastest one ever sent out anywhere, it'll take a total of 9.5 years to get there.

Answer 4

A trip to the Moon only takes 3 days.

A trip times to Mars takes around 9 months.

Mercury and Venus would be a few months away too, assuming a direct flight, but many trips to the inner planets have used gravitational assist maneuvers, which can take years.

A trip to Jupiter takes around 2 or 3 years, if a direct path is taken, but many space craft have used gravitational assist maneuvers which require flying by other planets, usually Venus and Earth, sometimes more than once, which adds years to the trip.

Answer 5

Probably 12 - 15 months.