How far has Voyager 1 traveled?
Voyager 1 is about 25.9 billion kilometers from Earth and is due to reach one light-day away around November 17 to 18, 2026. It is the most distant human-made object.
Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 travels at about 61,000 kilometers per hour relative to the Sun. Every year, it moves about 540 million kilometers farther away. Reaching one light-day means that radio signals traveling at the speed of light take a full 24 hours to reach the spacecraft, and another 24 hours for a reply to come back.
Voyager 2, launched about two weeks earlier but on a different path, is about 21 billion kilometers away. Both probes still send back data through NASA's Deep Space Network, a set of giant radio antennas in California, Spain and Australia. Their signals are incredibly faint by the time they reach Earth.
How long will it last?
Voyager 1's power supply is slowly running down, and NASA expects it to stop communicating sometime in the next few years. Even then, it will keep drifting through space. In about 40,000 years, it will pass within about 1.6 light-years of a star called Gliese 445.
Did You Know?
Although Voyager 1 is incredibly far away, it would still take tens of thousands of years to travel the distance to the nearest star.