text: It all depends how fast you travel! Mars is 35 million miles away from Earth at its closest approach, so you would need a very fast method of transport to cover that distance in an acceptable period of time. Current technology puts the travel time at something like 6-12 months, but the time for the whole journey there and back would be about 2-3 years as you would have to wait on Mars for a year until the Earth was close enough. \nHopefully in the not-to-distant future, new forms of spaceship might cut this journey time down considerably to perhaps just a couple of months.