Photo by mohammad alizade on Unsplash & Photo by Luca Rüegg on Unsplash

There are high hopes that mankind will set camp on Mars (and beyond) in the not-too-distant future. So high that we’ve even jumped the gun to make a movie about it. But the stories that circulate involving our efforts to set foot on the Red Planet sometimes fail to clarify one teeny tiny detail.

Since Mars is the fourth rock from the Sun, and Earth is the third, you’d think that the trip there will be relatively swift and uneventful? But that’s not even remotely true. Even though Mars is just a yardstick away from Earth on a cosmic scale, it actually takes months to complete the voyage, from lift-off to touchdown, with existing technology.

To illustrate this, visual wizards David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams have assembled an animated infographic that uses pixels to measure the distance from our water-drenched Earth to the barren red sands of Mars.

100 pixels equals 12,756 kilometers (the diameter of our planet). You’ll be flying at 7,000 pixels per second, or about three times the speed of light. Unfortunately, the graphic cannot be embedded here, so you’ll have to make a short trip to distancetomars.com to embark on the longer journey. If you like space stuff, you’ll savor every second of it. Enjoy! 😉