Compared to the immensity of the cosmos, the speed of light is incredibly slow: watch the animation by scientist James O’Donoghue
To understand how long it takes for light from Mars to reach us, we need to scale down the distance between Earth and the red planet when they are located (just under 55 million km). A NASA scientist has decided to make a video to show us how our perception of the cosmos changes when we observe this ray of light going first from the Earth to the Moon and then from the Earth to Mars. He enlarged the figures of the planets to make the footage as clear as possible.
Astronomical distances
Well, even traveling at the speed of light they take them 3 minutes and two seconds to send a message to the red planet (and another 3 minutes and two seconds to receive a response!). One of the things that immediately catches your eye, watching the video, is that the speed of light appears to us incredibly slow while covering these distances.
It takes light to reach the Moon just over a second (1.3 light seconds). Much less, in short, than the travel time of the Apollo missions, which took a long time three days to reach our satellite. In a second, then, the voice of the astronauts reached Earth, converted. It then took another second to receive a response.
The distance between Earth and Mars, however, varies based on the position of the two planets, as we anticipated at the beginning of this article. They want us anyway more than three minutes to get to your destination. This also means that, when NASA engineers send a command from Earth to the rovers on Mars, it takes 6 minutes to see if and how the command was executed.
