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I read that the communication delay between earth and mars is between 3 and 21 minutes.

So the delay changes over time (since the distance between earth and mars changes over time).

How can I get the delay at the current moment, or another specified moment in time?

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Download the Nasa's Eyes program, and use the "measure distance" option (rightclick on an object), to find its distance to another object. The distance in light seconds/minutes is the signal travel time.

The advantage over WolframAlpha is that you can easily set the time and check the distance for any arbitrary date; W.A. takes some tricky work to force it to give anything else than 'now'.

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  • $\begingroup$ Awesome, thanks for the answer! Is there a way to get this value programmatically, by an api/module/plugin (preferably Python)? $\endgroup$
    – Kevin
    Jul 26, 2016 at 12:16
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    $\begingroup$ @Kevin SPICE is the set of APIs that powers NASA's Eyes. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage
    Jul 26, 2016 at 14:09

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