When is Mars closest to Earth?
Why the distance keeps changing
Earth laps Mars on the inside track, catching up and passing it about every 780 days. At that moment — opposition — Mars sits opposite the Sun in our sky, rises at sunset, and is at its biggest and brightest. But because both orbits are elliptical, not every opposition is equal: the 2027 event is an aphelic opposition, with Mars near its farthest point from the Sun, so at ~101 million km it is one of the more distant close approaches. The genuinely spectacular perihelic oppositions, when Mars comes inside 60 million km, return in the 2030s.
The next few oppositions
Open the interactive view set to opposition day to see Earth and Mars lined up on the same side of the Sun — then scrub the date and watch the gap between them breathe open and shut.
Keep going
Every figure on this page is a real, rounded value checked against primary sources. Found something out of date? See how we keep it accurate.