After nearly fifty years, Voyager 1 spacecraft approaches one light-day milestone — 25.9 billion km distance from Earth ensures one day of latency for commands

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, is about to hit one light-day distance from us, or the distance that light travels in a single day. According to Science Clock, the satellite is going to be 16.1 billion miles or 25.9 billion kilometers away on November 15, 2026 — 49 years, 2 months, and 10 days since it launched. This means that the spacecraft travels at an approximate speed of 37,300 miles per hour (over 60,000 kilometers per hour) or more than 10 miles per second. At its current distance, it takes about a day to send commands to Voyager 1 and another day for it to respond.

NASA launched Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977, to explore the giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn, as well as some of their moons, and completed this mission in November 1980. After 10 years, the space agency began the Voyager Interstellar Mission, where it would explore the space outside the vicinity of our solar system. By 2004, it had entered the space where the solar wind from the sun slows down, with the satellite entering interstellar space in 2012.

The satellite is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which are expected to last until the 2030s, meaning we can still get a few years out of the Voyager 1. Its journey was actually almost cut short back in 2023, when a bit flip or corruption caused a critical memory error that prevented it from sending telemetry to move and align the spacecraft. Thankfully, the scientists and engineers were able to fix the issue, allowing it to continue its mission and gather data from the farthest corners of deep space.

Although it feels that Voyager 1 has covered a massive amount of distance since it was launched, it’s actually minuscule relative to the scale of the universe. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, is four light-years away, meaning it will take Voyager 1 at least 73,000 years to reach it at its current speed. Its batteries would have been long dead by then, but NASA also put a golden record on the spacecraft with the hopes that an alien civilization would find it and initiate contact in the far future.

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