How long does it take to reach Mars?

around 8 months. that other answer is just plain retarded.

The time taken to travel the 34.8 million miles from Earth to Mars would be about 8.4 months (235.2 days) each way. :PP

Yeah … you could have said that in a far less rude manner.

apparently it took curiosity 8 months..which means it was traveling at 1.8 miles a second O_o

we know speed = distance/time so the distance is 34 million miles (rounded down, and obviously the closest distance) and the time it took in seconds is 20304000 seconds (235 days) so if you divide 34 million by 20304000 seconds you get 1.67 miles/second

which is a practically impossible speed with a human bearing space ship…. the only plane that carries humans and travels that fast is the SR-71 Blackbird :O

also a while back someone calculated the time it would take for space ship with humans to travel at comfortable constant speed (you cant just be in jet mode all the time, people have needs that cannot be accomplished at high velocity) would require 40+ years :O

damn keyboard it 1.67 not 1.8 :O

Sorry but your assumptions are incorrect. When traveling through the solar system there is no straight line path; every celestial body is in motion. Both the Earth and Mars orbit the Sun in roughly circular orbits. The “minimum cost” trip to Mars uses only enough fuel to elongate the ships own orbit so it touches the orbit of Mars; of course this also has to be timed so that Mars is there when the orbits intersect. Faster trips to Mars are possible using more fuel to catch up with Mars more quickly but the problem here is that you also have to use fuel to slow down the ship so it won’t fly past it when it arrives. We don’t really care how long unmanned probes take to reach Mars but when we send people we may try to speed up the trip even though this will be very expensive fuel wise. The Curiosity probe actually accelerated to 3.45 mile/second to reach Mars. In space there is effectively no atmosphere or friction so you can’t compare space velocities to aircraft velocities. Just standing on earth we are traveling 1,000 miles/hour due to Earth’s rotation. The Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 miles/hour and our solar system is traveling 558,000 miles/hour around our galaxy and our galaxy is traveling 666,000 miles/hour away from the Big Bang.

granted the two planets do move apart and closer together all the time