How far is Jupiter from Earth right now?
Distance over the next three years
Distance between the centers of Earth and Jupiter. Hover or tap the chart to read any date.
Why the distance changes
Jupiter is so far from the Sun that Earth's own position matters most. Earth laps Jupiter about every 13 months: when we pass between Jupiter and the Sun, Jupiter is closest and at its brightest; half a cycle later, with the Sun between us, it is farthest.
Between 2000 and 2050, Jupiter is closest on September 26, 2022, at 591.3 million km (367.4 million miles), and farthest on September 25, 2016, at 965.5 million km (599.9 million miles).
Even at its closest, sunlight reflected from Jupiter takes more than half an hour to reach us, and a radio signal to a spacecraft there takes as long.
How this is calculated
Your browser calculates the position of Jupiter for the current moment from your device's clock, using the Astronomy Engine library, which is based on the VSOP87 planetary theory. We checked its Earth distances against NASA JPL data (via Astropy) for dates from 1950 to 2045: they agree to better than 0.02%. Distances are measured center to center.