How Much Would You Weigh on Other Planets? Full Table
Your mass never changes but your weight does. See what a scale reads on the Moon, Mars, Saturn and the Sun, and how high you could jump on each.
Table of Contents
The Scale in Your Bathroom Measures a Force
Step on a bathroom scale and it says 70 kg. It has no idea what your mass is. What it actually measures is how hard you press on a spring — about 687 newtons — and then it divides by 9.81, a number the factory wrote into its firmware, and prints a mass.
Carry that same scale to the Moon and it would read 11.6 kg. You would not have lost a single gram. Everything about you that makes you 70 kg is still there; only the thing the scale is really sensing has changed.
Mass Stays Put, Weight Travels
Mass is how much matter you are made of, and equivalently how stubbornly you resist being accelerated. It is the same on Earth, on Ceres, in free fall and in deep space. Weight is something else entirely: it is the force gravity exerts on that mass, and the whole relationship is one line,
W = m × g
with W in newtons, m in kilograms and g the local gravitational field strength in metres per second squared. On Earth g is 9.81 m s⁻², so a 70 kg person weighs 687 N. On the Moon g is 1.62 m s⁻², so the same person weighs 113 N. Mass and weight are different quantities in different units, and the kilogram belongs to the first of them.
The inertia part matters more than people expect. Your mass is unchanged on Mars, so a 200 kg barbell still takes 200 kg worth of momentum to get moving and the same again to stop. Lifting it is easier; shoving it sideways is not. The Apollo crews discovered the same thing in reverse: at one sixth of Earth’s weight they could bound along happily, but their suits and backpacks still had full terrestrial inertia, and stopping or turning sent several of them over.
Where Surface Gravity Comes From
Newton’s law of gravitation gives the field strength at the surface of a sphere of mass M and radius r as
g = GM/r²
with G = 6.674 × 10⁻¹¹ N m² kg⁻². Put in Earth’s mass of 5.97 × 10²⁴ kg and its mean radius of 6,371 km and you get 9.82 m s⁻², which is the measured value. Newton’s picture of gravity does the whole job here; you only need Einstein when the field gets extreme.
The formula has two levers pulling in opposite directions. More mass raises g, but more radius lowers it as the square. A body can therefore be enormously massive and still have a gentle surface, because you are standing a very long way from its centre. That single fact is what makes the real table of numbers so counter-intuitive.
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<text x="20" y="484" style="font-size:11px;fill:var(--color-text-muted,#5a6275)">Gas-giant values are quoted at the 1-bar pressure level and include the reduction from rotation.</text>
Saturn’s Paradox and the Problem with “Surface”
Saturn has 95.2 times Earth’s mass. It also has 9.45 times Earth’s diameter, and 95.2 divided by 9.45² is 1.07. A planet with ninety-five Earths inside it has a surface gravity within a few per cent of your kitchen floor.
It is actually slightly weaker than that, and the reason is spin. Saturn turns once every 10.7 hours, so at its equator the centrifugal effect subtracts roughly 1.6 m s⁻² from the 10.4 m s⁻² that mass and radius alone would give. NASA’s planetary fact sheet quotes the rotation-corrected equatorial value, 9.0 m s⁻², which is 0.916 Earths. Ignore the rotation and you get the 1.07 figure that circulates widely. Jupiter has the same split: 23.1 m s⁻² with rotation included, or 24.8 m s⁻² without, which is why you will see both 2.36 and 2.53 quoted for Jupiter.
There is a deeper caveat. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have no surface. The figures are quoted at the 1-bar pressure level, chosen because Earth’s sea-level pressure is 1 bar, and that choice is a convention rather than a place you could stand. Below it the hydrogen simply gets denser until it behaves like a metal.
Two more oddities fall out of g = GM/r². Mars and Mercury land on almost exactly the same value, 0.377 and 0.378, even though Mercury is barely two thirds of Mars’s diameter — Mercury is iron-rich and dense at 5,429 kg m⁻³ against Mars’s 3,934. And Venus, Uranus and Saturn all cluster just below Earth, at 0.907, 0.889 and 0.916, from completely different combinations of mass and size.
Jumping, Throwing and Olympic Records
Your legs do a fixed amount of work in a standing jump. Raising your centre of mass by a height h costs mgh, so for the same muscular effort h is inversely proportional to g. A 0.50 m standing vertical jump on Earth becomes 1.33 m on Mars and 3.0 m on the Moon, and on Ceres it becomes a slow, 17 m arc lasting the better part of a minute. Keeping your balance at the top is another matter, since your centre of gravity does not care which world it is on.
Projectile range scales the same way. For a given launch speed and angle, range is v²sin(2θ)/g, so everything goes exactly as far as the gravity is weak. Mike Powell’s long jump world record of 8.95 m, set in Tokyo in 1991, is mostly a ballistic flight: the run-up speed would be unchanged on Mars, so the same jump would carry about 24 m there and roughly 54 m on the Moon. Ryan Crouser’s 23.56 m shot put from 2023 would land about 140 m downrange on the Moon. Weightlifting records would be the odd ones out, because the barbell’s inertia travels with it even when its weight does not.
The Extremes: the Sun and a Neutron Star
The Sun’s equatorial surface gravity is 274 m s⁻², which is 28 times Earth’s. A 70 kg person would push on the scale like 1,960 kg and manage a vertical jump of 1.8 cm. Escaping the Sun’s gravity from the photosphere needs 617.6 km s⁻¹, against 11.19 km s⁻¹ from Earth.
Then there is the far end. A neutron star packs about 1.4 solar masses into a radius of roughly 12 km, which puts g near 1.3 × 10¹² m s⁻² — of order 10¹¹ times Earth’s. Your 70 kg would register as a weight of about 9 × 10¹³ newtons, your best jump would lift you some 4 × 10⁻¹² m, less than the width of an atom, and the Newtonian escape velocity comes out above half the speed of light, which is the formula’s way of announcing that it has stopped being valid. At that point you need general relativity, and the tidal gradient across your own body would have settled matters long before you landed.
Weight Is a Local Fact
The number on the scale is not a property of you. It is a joint statement about you and whatever you happen to be standing on, and it is the only one of the two that travels. Orbit is the same lesson in motion: the International Space Station is still deep in Earth’s gravity, at about 88 per cent of surface strength, and everyone aboard reads zero on the scale because the scale is falling with them. Your mass is yours. The newtons are rented.
Sources and Further Reading
- NASA NSSDCA Planetary Fact Sheet, values compared to Earth
- NASA NSSDCA Planetary Fact Sheet, metric units
- NASA NSSDCA notes on the fact sheets, including the 1-bar and rotation conventions for surface gravity
- NASA NSSDCA Sun Fact Sheet
- NASA NSSDCA Pluto Fact Sheet
- R. S. Park and colleagues, A partially differentiated interior for Ceres deduced from its gravity field and shape, Nature 537, 515 (2016)
- World Athletics records
Frequently Asked Questions
How much would I weigh on other planets?
Multiply your Earth weight by the planet's surface gravity relative to Earth. Using NASA's figures, those ratios are 0.166 for the Moon, 0.378 for Mercury, 0.377 for Mars, 0.907 for Venus, 0.916 for Saturn, 0.889 for Uranus, 1.12 for Neptune, 2.36 for Jupiter, 0.063 for Pluto and about 0.029 for Ceres. So a 70 kg person would make a scale read 11.6 kg on the Moon, 26.4 kg on Mars, 63.5 kg on Venus, 64.1 kg on Saturn and 165 kg on Jupiter. On the Sun, where surface gravity is 28 times Earth's, the reading would be about 1,960 kg. Your mass stays 70 kg in every one of those places, because mass is the amount of matter in you and does not depend on where you stand. Only the weight, the force gravity exerts, changes.
What is the difference between mass and weight?
Mass is how much matter an object contains and how strongly it resists acceleration; weight is the force that gravity exerts on that mass. Mass is measured in kilograms and is the same everywhere in the universe. Weight is measured in newtons and follows the equation W = m × g, where g is the local gravitational field strength. On Earth g is 9.81 m per second squared, so a 70 kg person weighs 687 newtons. On the Moon g is 1.62, so the same person weighs 113 newtons while still having a mass of 70 kg. Everyday language blurs the two because bathroom scales are calibrated for Earth: a scale senses force and then divides by 9.81 to display a mass. Take it somewhere else and the display is wrong, even though the spring inside is reading correctly.
Why is Saturn's gravity almost the same as Earth's?
Because surface gravity depends on radius as well as mass, and Saturn is huge. The formula is g = GM/r², so a body spread over a larger radius has a weaker pull at its surface even if it contains far more matter. Saturn has 95.2 Earth masses but 9.45 Earth diameters, and 95.2 divided by 9.45 squared is about 1.07. Saturn's rapid spin, one turn every 10.7 hours, removes roughly another 1.6 m per second squared at the equator, which brings the figure down to NASA's quoted 9.0 m per second squared, or 0.916 Earths. Saturn's mean density is only 687 kg per cubic metre, less than water, which is the same fact seen from another angle. Note also that this value is quoted at the 1-bar pressure level, since Saturn has no solid surface to stand on.
How high could you jump on the Moon?
About six times as high as on Earth, so roughly 3 metres for someone who can manage a 0.50 m standing vertical jump at home. The reasoning is short: your legs deliver a fixed amount of work in a jump, and lifting your centre of mass by a height h costs mgh, so h is inversely proportional to the local gravity g. The Moon's surface gravity is 0.166 of Earth's, which gives a factor of about 6.0. The same scaling gives 1.33 m on Mars and around 17 m on the dwarf planet Ceres. In practice the Apollo astronauts jumped far less than this, because a pressurised suit and life-support backpack added well over 80 kg of mass and severely restricted knee and ankle movement, and because falling over on the Moon is awkward and risky.