Science Puzzle
How Long Would It Take to Drive to the Moon?
The Moon is, on average, 384,400 kilometres from Earth. Imagine there were a road all the way there and you could drive along it at a steady 100 kilometres per hour, never stopping for fuel, food or sleep.
How long would the journey take?
The Answer
About 160 days, more than five months of non-stop driving.
At 100 kilometres per hour, 384,400 kilometres takes 3,844 hours. Divide by 24 and that's about 160 days. Set off on New Year's Day and you'd arrive in early June.
The Apollo astronauts made the trip in about three days, travelling at thousands of kilometres per hour. Light does it in about 1.3 seconds, which is why there's a tiny delay in radio conversations between Earth and anyone on the Moon.
The gap is far bigger than most pictures suggest. Textbook diagrams usually draw the Moon close to Earth so that both fit on the page. In reality the gap is about 30 times the width of the Earth. Put all the other planets of the solar system side by side and, at the Moon's average distance, they would just about fit in the space between us and the Moon.
The principle: Scale in space. Time equals distance divided by speed, and turning astronomical distances into everyday journeys shows how vast even the nearest gaps in space are.