at what distance from the earth will a spacecraft traveling directly from the earth to the moon

Distances in Space

To empathise distances in space, you should know about mutual measurement units such as the astronomical unit (au) and the lite-yr (ly).

• 1 astronomical unit (au) is the average altitude from the Sun to the Earth, approximately 150 million km (93 million miles).
• 1 light-year (ly) is the distance that a photon of calorie-free can travel through the vacuum of space in 1 Earth year, approximately 9.five trillion km (5.nine trillion miles).

For more than information, review the lesson measurement units in space.

To visualize distances in space, it'due south also helpful to have a few real-world examples to imagine how fast y'all would demand to travel to get somewhere. I like to use these ones:

• A automobile traveling on the open up route (100 km/h)
• A commercial jet airplane (k km/h)
• The fastest robotic spacecraft (250,000 km/h)
• The speed of light (1,079,252,848,800 (i trillion) km/h)

Notes:

• Robotic spacecraft can go much faster than spaceships carrying people, and so it would have a human crew a lot longer to go anywhere.
• The speed of cars, planes and spacecraft are useful when we're talking nigh things within the Solar Organisation simply once you get out into the galaxy and Universe, the speed of light is the only practical i.

At present let's look at some of import distances in space, starting here on Earth and working outwards...

Earth & Moon

World has a circumference of twoscore,000 km. To travel all the mode around the planet at the equator, this is how long it would take:

• Automobile:  16.vii days
• Aeroplane:  1.7 days
• Robotic spacecraft:  9½ minutes
• Speed of light:  0.133 seconds

The Moon orbits World at an average distance of 384,400 km, which is roughly ten times the distance around the Globe'southward equator. To travel from Earth to the Moon information technology would take this long:

• Car: 160 days (almost half a year)
• Plane:  16 days
• Robotic spacecraft:  93 minutes (a spacecraft with human passengers would accept most 3 days)
• Speed of light:  1.28 seconds

As noted previously, if the Earth was the size of a basketball the Moon would be the size of a tennis brawl. What surprises most people is that the tennis ball would be orbiting the basketball game at a distance of seven metres away.

The paradigm to a higher place shows the Globe and Moon with both the correct size and altitude scale to each other. This is one of the very few examples of celestial objects that can be shown like this—almost are likewise far apart to fit in the same image without the objects shrinking to less than a single pixel. Indeed, information technology's a very large leap in calibration from the World/Moon system to the Solar System...

The Solar Organization

At that place is some disagreement over the exact size of the Solar Organisation but using the smallest approximate, the Solar System is at least 100,000 times bigger than the World/Moon arrangement. The table below shows distances from the Sun to various objects inside the Solar System.

Object	Distance from Sunday		Travel Fourth dimension from Sun
	km	au	Car	Airplane	Spacecraft	Lite speed
Mercury	58,000,000	0.387	66 years	vi years	10 days	3.2 minutes
Venus	108,450,000	0.723	124 years	12 years	18 days	half dozen.0 minutes
Earth	150,000,000	i	171 years	17 years	25 days	viii.3 minutes
Mars	228,450,000	ane.523	261 years	26 years	38 days	12.6 minutes
Jupiter	780,450,000	5.203	891 years	89 years	4 months	43.2 minutes
Saturn	1,430,700,000	nine.538	1,633 years	163 years	8 months	1.iii hours
Uranus	2,972,850,000	19.819	iii,934 years	393 years	ane yr, four months	ii.7 hours
Neptune	4,508,700,000	30.058	five,147 years	515 years	ii years, 1 calendar month	4.one hours
Pluto	five,916,000,000	39.44	6,753 years	673 years	2 years, 8 months	5.5 hours
Voyager 1 (robotic space probe)	eighteen,800,000,000	141	21,461 years	2,146 years	8 years, vi months	17.4 hours

Discover the big leap from Mars to Jupiter and like big jumps out to more than distant objects. The four inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) are relatively close to the Lord's day but the gaps between more distant objects are much larger.

This is a skilful example of how distances become much bigger every bit nosotros head outwards from Earth. Here are the planets' orbits relative to each other:

The Nearest Stars

Autonomously from the Sun, the nearest stars to us are the 3 stars in the Alpha Centauri system, almost 4.2 low-cal-years away.

The Milky way Milky way

Our milky way, the Milky Way, is most 100,000 light-years broad—over 160 one thousand thousand times the size of the Solar System.

Nearby Galaxies

Andromeda is the nearest similar milky way to the Milky Way. Information technology'due south well-nigh 2 ½ one thousand thousand light-years abroad.

The Whole Universe

We don't really know how big the whole Universe is because we tin't come across it all. We can see about 13 billion light-years in every management but when we allow for factors such as the move of galaxies and the fourth dimension it takes light to achieve usa from them, the observable Universe appears to be around 93 billion lite-years wide. That's just the part of the Universe that we can run across—there's presumably much more across that. It's possible that the Universe is infinite in size merely nosotros don't know.

Summary

I encourage amateur infinite enthusiasts to do using units of distance based on the speed of light, for several reasons. They're fairly intuitive and can comprehend all astronomical distances, and after equally you lot learn more about the Universe you'll find it helpful to be familiar with low-cal-speed and distances.

Distances based on low-cal speed

Within the Solar System: Calorie-free-minutes, lite-hours.
Within the Milky way: Calorie-free-years (up to 100,000 ly).
The wider Universe: Millions and billions of light-years.

Retrieve, everything is bigger than you thought and farther away than you lot can imagine.

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>> Go dorsum to Learning Nearly Space.

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Source: https://www.spacecentre.nz/resources/learn/universe/distances.html

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