How far away is Mercury right now?

103,026,114

kilometres · Mercury's distance from Earth

About 268 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
An airliner at cruising speed would take 13 years to cover it.

Right now Mercury is too close to the Sun to see.

Right now Mercury is about 103 million kilometres from Earth, and the gap changes every second. A radio message, moving at the speed of light, needs 5.7 minutes to cross it.

Mercury circles close to the Sun, so its distance from us swings between 77.3 million and 222 million kilometres. It passes nearest to Earth about 3.2 times a year. The next close approach is on 3 November 2026.

Time until Mercury's next close approach to Earth

3 d 10 h 42 m 22 s

Measured

Length of a solar day on Mercury (sunrise to sunrise)

176 days

Measured

Mercury's average speed around the Sun

47.36 km/s

Measured

Average surface temperature of Mercury

167 °C

Estimated

What is Mercury?

The smallest planet

Mercury is the planet nearest the Sun, the first of the eight. Like Earth, it is a world of rock and metal, with solid ground. Its surface is scarred by craters, much like our Moon.

It is the smallest planet of all. Earth is about 2.6 times as wide, and about 18 planets the size of Mercury would fit inside it. Mercury is only about 1.4 times as wide as the Moon.

Mercury has no moons and no rings. It has almost no air either, only a thin haze of atoms knocked off its surface by the Sun.

Inside, Mercury is mostly metal. NASA says its core reaches out to about 85% of the way to the surface. Only Earth is denser.

The Romans named it after their swiftest god. The name fits: no planet moves faster.

4,881 kmEquatorial diameter of Mercury

The next close approach

Why the distance keeps changing

Earth and Mercury both circle the Sun, like runners on a track. Mercury has the inside lane, and it is much quicker. It laps Earth about 3.2 times a year.

Each time it overtakes us, Mercury passes between Earth and the Sun. That is when it comes closest. Astronomers call the line-up an inferior conjunction. Then Mercury swings round to the far side of the Sun, up to 222 million kilometres away.

Here is a surprise. Venus comes closer to us than Mercury ever does. But Venus also spends long spells far away, beyond the Sun. Mercury never strays as far. So averaged over time, Mercury is the planet nearest to Earth, at about 1.04 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. It is the nearest, on average, to every other planet too.

The clock on this page counts down to the next close approach, on 3 November 2026.

3 d 10 h 42 m 22 sTime until Mercury's next close approach to Earth

Right now

A hello that takes minutes

Radio waves are a kind of light, and nothing travels faster. Even so, a message to Mercury takes time. At today's distance it needs 5.7 minutes to arrive.

The wait shrinks when Mercury passes between us and the Sun, and grows when it slips behind the Sun. Every word to a spacecraft there, and every picture back, crosses that gap.

Few spacecraft have made the trip. Mercury sits so deep in the Sun's pull that, as ESA puts it, an orbiter finds it harder to reach than Saturn. Only one has circled it so far.

That was NASA's MESSENGER, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. It arrived in March 2011 and worked for four years, until it plunged into the surface on 30 April 2015. Europe and Japan's BepiColombo is arriving now. As of October 2026, ESA expects it at Mercury in December 2026, with regular science from April 2027.

103,026,113 kmMercury's distance from Earth

Racing round the Sun

The fastest planet, and the longest day

Mercury races round the Sun at about 47 kilometres per second on average. That is about 1.6 times as fast as Earth. Since you opened this page, Mercury has travelled 0 kilometres.

So its year is short: one lap takes about 88 Earth days. Its path is oval, so it speeds up near the Sun and slows down far from it.

Its spin is slow: one turn takes 59 days. Put the fast lap and the slow spin together, and the Sun crawls across its sky. From one sunrise to the next takes 176 days, about 2 Mercury years. If you stood on Mercury, you would see two birthdays pass between one sunrise and the next. In some places the Sun even rises, sets again, and rises once more, NASA says.

47.36 km/sMercury's average speed around the Sun

Day and night

Fire and ice

From Mercury, the Sun would look more than three times as large as it does from Earth. In the day, the ground can reach 430 °C.

But Mercury has no blanket of air to hold that heat. When night falls, the warmth escapes into space, and the ground can drop to -180 °C. That is a swing of hundreds of degrees between noon and midnight.

Averaged over the whole planet, the temperature is 167 °C, against 15 °C on Earth. Yet Mercury is not the hottest planet. Venus, farther out, is hotter, because its thick air traps the heat.

Strangest of all, there may be ice on Mercury. Deep craters near its poles lie in permanent shadow. NASA says it could be cold enough there to keep water frozen, on the planet nearest the Sun.