Millimeters Per Second to Meters Per Second (mm/s to m/s)

1 millimeter per second equals 0.001 meters per second exactly.

1 millimeter per second = 0.001 meters per second

How to convert millimeters per second to meters per second

To convert millimeters per second to meters per second, multiply the number of millimeters per second by 0.001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters per second by 1,000.

meters per second = millimeters per second × 0.001

Example: 10 millimeters per second = 0.01 meters per second.

About these units

Millimeter Per Second (mm/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter per second. Used for very slow motion.

Biology and glaciology supply good yardsticks for a millimeter per second. The fastest-swimming bacterium, Thiovulum majus, typically moves at about 0.6 mm/s, and the Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier was recorded flowing at about 0.4 mm/s in 2003. At that rate ice covers roughly 35 meters in a day, because 0.4 mm/s multiplied by 86,400 seconds is about 34.6 m.

Faster, but still slow, is the world record speed of a snail, set in the United Kingdom at 2.75 mm/s, which works out to about 9.9 meters per hour. A millimeter per second is 0.001 m/s, so one meter per second equals 1,000 mm/s. The unit suits slow mechanisms, where meters per second would give awkward decimals, and it sits one step below the centimeter per second in the metric ladder.

1 millimeter per second = 0.001 meters per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (speed); Wikipedia: Metre per second

Meter Per Second (m/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of speed. Walking pace is about 1.4 m/s; a sprinter reaches roughly 10 m/s.

Official standing arrived in 1960, when the CGPM established the SI and made the meter per second the unit for speed and velocity. Before that, feet per second, miles per hour and knots were more common, depending on region and trade. One proposal gave 1 m/s its own name, the benz, after Karl Benz, but it was rejected and never caught on, so the unit is still written as a plain ratio of meter to second.

The meter is now defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and the second by the vibration of caesium atoms, so the meter per second rests on two physical standards. Exactly 3.6 km/h make 1 m/s, and it equals about 2.2369 mph or 1.9438 knots. For scale, sound travels at about 343 m/s in dry air at 20 °C, and Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 reached about 361 m/s, Mach 1.06, in October 1947. Physics and engineering use the unit almost exclusively.

The meter per second is the reference unit for speed on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Metre per second; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Sound barrier

Related conversions

See all speed units.