How far away is Jupiter right now?

824,742,047

kilometres · Jupiter's distance from Earth

About 5.5 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
An airliner at cruising speed would take 104 years to cover it.

Right now Jupiter is in the morning sky, before dawn.

Right now Jupiter is about 825 million kilometres from Earth, and the gap changes every second. A radio message, moving at the speed of light, needs 46 minutes to cross it.

Jupiter circles the Sun far beyond Mars, so it is never near. Its distance from us swings between 589 million and 969 million kilometres. The next close approach is on 10 February 2027.

Time until Jupiter's next close approach to Earth

102 d 12 h 50 m 57 s

Measured

Length of one turn of Jupiter (sidereal day)

9 h 55 m 30 s

Measured

Temperature of Jupiter at the 1 bar level

-108 °C

Measured, with error

Number of known moons of Jupiter

115

Measured

What is Jupiter?

The giant of the planets

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun, and by far the largest. It is a gas giant: a huge ball made mostly of hydrogen and helium, the same two gases as the Sun. It has no solid ground to stand on.

Jupiter is about 11 times as wide as Earth, and about 1,400 Earths would fit inside it. It has about 318 times Earth's mass. That is about 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets put together.

Deep inside, the weight of all that gas squeezes the hydrogen into a liquid. NASA calls it the largest ocean in the solar system, an ocean of hydrogen instead of water.

The biggest planet is named after the king of the Roman gods. Most of its moons carry the names of figures from his stories.

142,984 kmJupiter's diameter at the equator

The next close approach

Why the distance keeps changing

Earth and Jupiter both circle the Sun, like runners on a track. Jupiter has an outer lane and a slower pace, about 13 kilometres per second. Since you opened this page, it has travelled 0 kilometres. Even so, one lap takes it about 12 Earth years.

So Earth keeps catching up and overtaking it, about once every 1.09 years. Then the two planets are on the same side of the Sun, as close as they get. Jupiter stands opposite the Sun in our sky, rising at sunset and shining all night. Astronomers call this opposition.

Months later, Jupiter lies beyond the Sun, up to 969 million kilometres away.

Not every meeting is equally close. Jupiter's orbit is slightly oval, so the nearest meetings come once in each Jupiter year. They happen when Earth catches up near Jupiter's closest point to the Sun. The clock on this page counts down to the next close approach, on 10 February 2027.

102 d 12 h 50 m 57 sTime until Jupiter's next close approach to Earth

Right now

A hello that takes most of an hour

Radio waves are a kind of light, and nothing travels faster. Even so, a message to Jupiter takes a long time. At today's distance it needs 46 minutes to arrive, and the reply needs as long again.

That gap made for a tense night. On 4 July 2016, NASA's Juno spacecraft fired its engine to slow down and be caught by Jupiter's gravity. Nobody on Earth could correct it in time. Every signal the team received told them about something that had already happened.

It worked. Juno has circled Jupiter ever since, swooping low over the clouds and out again. NASA still lists it as an active mission (October 2026).

More are on the way. NASA's Europa Clipper is due at Jupiter in April 2030, and Europe's Juice in July 2031. Each will send its pictures home across the same long gap.

824,742,044 kmJupiter's distance from Earth

One turn

The shortest day, the oldest storm

Jupiter spins faster than any other planet. One turn takes 9 h 55 m 30 s, so a day there is less than half as long as ours. Its year is long, though: it holds about 10,000 of those short days.

The fast spin stretches the clouds into stripes: pale zones and darker belts, with winds blowing east and west in turn. Near the equator they reach about 150 metres per second. That is about 1.5 times as fast as a high-speed train.

With no ground to slow them down, storms on Jupiter can last a very long time. The Great Red Spot is a storm larger than Earth. A study in 2024 traced it back to 1831; a spot seen in 1665 was probably a different storm, which faded away. The Great Red Spot has been shrinking for a century and more, and nobody yet knows how long it will last.

9 h 55 m 30 sLength of one turn of Jupiter (sidereal day)

Temperature at the 1 bar level

Cold at the cloud tops

Jupiter has no surface, so there is no ground to take its temperature. Instead, scientists measure it where the air presses as hard as ours does at sea level. They call that height the 1 bar level.

There it is -108 °C. Earth's average is 15 °C. Jupiter is about 5.2 times as far from the Sun as we are, so its sunlight is weak.

Higher up, it is colder still. Deeper down, the pressure and the heat keep climbing. NASA says a spacecraft falling into Jupiter would be crushed, melted and vaporised, with nowhere to land.

That is how NASA's Galileo orbiter ended in September 2003. It was running out of fuel, so the team steered it into Jupiter on purpose. That way it could never crash into Europa and carry microbes from Earth to its ocean.

-108 °CTemperature of Jupiter at the 1 bar level

Moons known

Four great moons

Jupiter has 115 known moons, as of October 2026. Four of them are worlds in their own right.

Galileo Galilei saw these four first, through an early telescope, in 1610. They were the first moons ever found beyond Earth's own. Today we call them the Galilean moons.

Io is the most volcanic world in the solar system, with hundreds of volcanoes. Europa hides a salty ocean under its ice, which may hold twice as much water as all of Earth's oceans. Ganymede is the largest moon of all, bigger than the planet Mercury. Callisto, the outermost of the four, completes the family.

That ocean on Europa makes it one of the best places to look for life beyond Earth. Europa Clipper will fly past it again and again, to learn whether the ocean could support life.