In fact, you can only land a small part of the ship on Mars, because landing everything on the surface and lifting it off again would require enormous amounts of fuel. ( Maybe someday we could manufacture rocket fuel on Mars ). On the first trip to Mars, it is necessary to bring all of this fuel with you to Mars. If you want to explore the surface of Mars, you will also need fuel to get your lander off the surface of Mars. In order to get out of your elliptical orbit around the Sun, and into Mars orbit, you will again need to burn some fuel. In fact, you MUST spend some time at Mars! If you were to continue on your orbit around the Sun, then when you got back to where you started, Earth would no longer be where you left it! That is there is only one launch window every 26 months.Īfter spending 9 months on the way to Mars, you will probably want to spend some time there. You have to plan ahead to make sure that by the time you reach the distance of Mar's orbit, that Mars is where you need it to be! Practically, this means that you can only begin your trip when Earth and Mars are properly lined up. In the nine months it takes to get to Mars, Mars moves a considerable distance around in its orbit, about 3/8 of the way around the Sun. With current rocket technology, this isn't really feasible. It is possible to get to Mars in less time, but this would require you to burn your rocket engines longer, using more fuel. Since it would be nice to spend some time at Mars, we are only interested in the one way trip ( solid line ) which is half of the orbit, and would take half the time of the full orbit, or about nine months. Therefore, it would take about one and a half years to complete the elliptical orbit above ( solid and dashed parts! ). Accordingly, we can estimate the time it would take to complete this orbit by averaging the lengths of Earth's orbit and Mars' orbit. The elliptical orbit which carries you from Earth to Mars is longer than Earth's orbit, but shorter than Mars' orbit. How long does it take? It takes the Earth one year to orbit the Sun and it takes Mars about 1.9 years ( say 2 years for easy calculation ) to orbit the Sun. I will capture the relevant comments below: Some high-speed transfer orbits could make the trip in as little as 130 days.įor a more detailed discussion, see the course notes for Physics 6 by Prof. Again, the details depend on the rocket velocity and the closeness of the planets, but 260 days is the number I hear most often give or take 10 days. The typical time during Mars's closest approach to the Earth every 1.6 years is about 260 days. It depends on the details of the orbit you take between the Earth and Mars. This, by the way, is called a Hoeman Transfer Orbit, and is the main stay of interplanetary space travel. Q2811 How long would a trip to Mars take?Ĭontrary to the 'point and shoot' idea, an actual trip to mars looks very round a bout as the figure above shows for a typical 'minimum cost' trajectory.
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