how long will it take traveling to mercury if I was going 100 miles per minute

Have you ever wondered how long it might take to travel to Mercury? At its closest point, Mercury gets to within 77.3 million km away from the Earth. Let’s see how long it takes for various spacecraft to get to Mercury.

For starters, let’s look at how long light itself takes to make the journey. Light takes only 4.3 minutes to travel from the Earth to Mercury when they’re at their closest point.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth is NASA’s New Horizons mission, currently on its way to visit Pluto and the outer Solar System. New Horizons is traveling at about 80,000 kilometers per hour. It would take about 40 days to get from the Earth to Mercury when they’re closest.

Of course, spacecraft don’t travel a straight route between planets, they follow a path that uses the least amount of energy, and so it takes them longer… a lot longer. The first spacecraft to actually make the journey to Mercury was NASA’s Mariner 10, which launched on November 3, 1973. It made its first Mercury flyby on March 29, 1974. Mariner 10 took 147 days to get from Earth to Mercury.