How many miles is the Planet Mars from Earth, how many days does it require for a rocket to reach Mars?

Question

What happened to the 'CYDONIAN CITY'? Do Earthlings want to pursue the treasures of long lost Martians underground and How and when was the hill formed as a Human face and Pyramids identical to Earth's?

Answer 1

anobium625 is right about the distances; wrong about the time.

The way we actually get to Mars (usually), is to put our spacecraft into an elliptical orbit around the sun. An elliptical orbit is closer to the sun at one end, and farther from the sun at the other end. We work it so that at the "close end," the spacecraft is 93 million miles from the sun (just where earth happens to be); and at the "far end," the spacecraft is about 130 million miles from the sun (just where Mars happens to be).

Once we get the craft into that orbit, we turn off the rockets and it basically coasts. Its path, and the time it takes, then depends entirely on the gravity of the sun. This trip takes 7 or 8 months.

Here is an (old) animation that I made, which illustrates it:

http://www.incolor.com/rbrown/astro/images/pathfndr.mov

In this movie, the green loop is earth's orbit, the brown loop is Mars' orbit, and the red loop is the orbit of Pathfinder, which went to Mars in 1997. In the lower right, you can see the date advance as the space probe travels.

Another popular way to move spacecraft around in the solar system is to send them so that they "slingshot" around various planets, each time getting a boost of speed from the planet's gravity. This is a good way to get a spacecraft where you want it while using a minimum amount of rocket fuel. However, it requires very complicated calculations to get the path just right, and it takes much, much longer than the "direct" approach mentioned above. For example, the Cassini probe to Saturn followed a very strange path. First it flew past Venus to get a boost; then it went around the sun once and then past Venus again for a second boost; then went past the EARTH for a third boost; then out to Jupiter for a fourth boost; and then finally on to Saturn.

Answer 2

Mars varies in its distance from the earth because neither planet moves at the same speed, and neither moves in an orbit that is exactly circular. The distance between the planets varies from 33,900,000 to 249,400,000 miles, quite a difference.

The time required to reach Mars would depend, of course, on the speed of the rocket. Taking 17,000 mph as a not unreasonable average speed, the minimum time would be 33,900,000 / 17,000 = 1,994 hours = 83 days. On the other hand, we don't get that close to Mars very often, and after you got there, it would be a long wait to get that close again. The average distance to Mars is about three times the minimum and would take three times as long.

Getting there is only part of the problem, braking and landing will also take a long time! The last NASA flight took 7 months for the trip and 6 months to get into orbit. Read some Edgar Rice Burroughs. He got there much faster!

Answer 3

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RE:
How many miles is the Planet Mars from Earth, how many days does it require for a rocket to reach Mars?
What happened to the 'CYDONIAN CITY'? Do Earthlings want to pursue the treasures of long lost Martians underground and How and when was the hill formed as a Human face and Pyramids identical to Earth's?

Answer 4

It is because the beings that live out of the planet of Earth are very far away. Why would they come here? There isn't really any reason for them to and even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to because they most probably live very far away from the Earth and it would be near impossible to travel so far. We can go to other planets, like Mars and we can also go to the moon and what not, this is because these celestial bodies are close to us, the nearest living extraterrestrial beings that exist may be even millions of solar systems away. Rockets can only travel relatively short distances on the cosmological scale. So the basic reason, is that they are too far away. The odds of extraterrestrial life existing is very high, but the odds of us meeting them is low. Even though they probably do exist somewhere in the universe, we wouldn't know because they are very far away because the universe is a very large place, more large than you or I could possibly comprehend or imagine.

Answer 5

takes more than a year and a half for a rocket to get there.