How far is Mars from Earth right now?
Distance over the next three years
Distance between the centers of Earth and Mars. Hover or tap the chart to read any date.
Why the distance changes
Mars and Earth both orbit the Sun, but Earth moves faster, catching up with Mars about every 26 months. Those catch-ups, called oppositions, are when Mars is closest and brightest in the night sky. When the two planets are on opposite sides of the Sun, Mars is at its farthest.
Not every close approach is equally close. Mars's orbit is noticeably oval, so an approach near the point where Mars is nearest the Sun can be almost half the distance of one near its farthest point. The 2003 approach was the closest in about 60,000 years.
Between 2000 and 2050, Mars is closest on August 27, 2003, at 55.8 million km (34.6 million miles), and farthest on August 28, 2019, at 400.2 million km (248.7 million miles).
Space agencies launch missions to Mars shortly before close approaches, in windows about 26 months apart, because the trip then takes the least fuel.
How this is calculated
Your browser calculates the position of Mars 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.