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Example: Voyager

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Voyager 1 & 2 · Launched 1977

49 years out, and still calling home

Two spacecraft launched to fly past the giant planets. Both kept going. Today they are the only working spacecraft in interstellar space, sending home 160 bits a second from farther away than anything else we have built.57

Voyager 1 mission clock

17,941d 10:28:12

A simplified drawing of the Golden Record’s cover: how to play it, a map of 14 pulsars, and a hydrogen atom.
The Golden Record’s cover, simplified8

Live

Where they are right now

Positions from NASA JPL’s Horizons system, counted forward every tenth of a second at each probe’s current speed.6

Voyager 1

Most distant human-made object

Distance from Earth

25,822,362,810 km

In AU
172.6118
Light time, one way
23h 55m 34s
Speed, from the Sun
16.88 km/s
Mission clock17
17,941d 10:28:12

Voyager 2

The only visitor to Uranus and Neptune

Distance from Earth

21,590,160,224 km

In AU
144.3213
Light time, one way
20h 00m 17s
Speed, from the Sun
15.05 km/s
Mission clock3
17,957d 08:54:29

One light-day

On November 18, 2026, Voyager 1 becomes the first human-made object a full day’s light-travel from Earth: 25,902,068,356 km.5

Crossing in · 10:16:07 UTC

29d 10h 51m 53s

Deep Space Network

Send a ping, wait two days

A command to Voyager 1 travels at the speed of light and still takes almost a day to arrive. The answer takes another day to come back. Send one and see when it would land.

Earth on the left, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to the right at their true relative distances, with a ping traveling out and back. EARTH VOYAGER 1 · 172.6 AU VOYAGER 2 · 144.3 AU
To scale with each other. The animation runs 10,000 times faster than light; the times below are real.

The Grand Tour

Four planets, two paths out

Scroll the diagram

Voyager 1 passes Jupiter and Saturn, then climbs north out of the planets' plane. Voyager 2 passes Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, then heads south. Not to scale. EARTH · 1977 JUPITER SATURN URANUS · 1986 NEPTUNE · 1989 VOYAGER 1 · NORTH ↗ VOYAGER 2 · SOUTH ↘
Schematic, not to scale. Directions are relative to the plane of the planets.1

Mission log

Half a century, one line at a time

V1 · Voyager 1 V2 · Voyager 2

  1. 1977-08-20 · V2

    Launch

    Voyager 2 launches first.1

  2. 1977-09-05 · V1

    Launch

    Voyager 1 follows on a faster, shorter trajectory, and reaches Jupiter first.1

  3. 1979-03-05 · V1

    Jupiter

    Closest approach, 277,400 km.1

  4. 1979-07-09 · V2

    Jupiter

    Closest approach, 650,180 km.1

  5. 1980-11-12 · V1

    Saturn

    Closest approach, 64,200 km.1

  6. 1981-08-25 · V2

    Saturn

    Closest approach, 41,000 km.1

  7. 1986-01-24 · V2

    Uranus

    The first spacecraft to fly past Uranus, at 81,500 km.13

  8. 1989-08-25 · V2

    Neptune

    The first to fly past Neptune, just 5,000 km away.13

  9. 1990-02-14 · V1

    Family portrait

    The last pictures, including the Pale Blue Dot, from 40 AU. The cameras were then switched off for good.28

  10. 1998-02-17 · V1

    Farthest ever

    Overtakes Pioneer 10 at 69.4 AU to become the most distant human-made object.2

  11. 2004-12-16 · V1

    Termination shock

    Reaches the termination shock and enters the heliosheath.2

  12. 2007-08-30 · V2

    Termination shock

    Follows its twin into the heliosheath.3

  13. 2012-08-25 · V1

    Interstellar space

    The first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere.2

  14. 2018-11-05 · V2

    Interstellar space

    Its plasma instrument sees the solar wind stop, more than 18 billion km from Earth.4

  15. 2023-11-14 · V1

    Garbled data

    One failed memory chip in the flight data computer turns the downlink into nonsense.11

  16. 2024-04-20 · V1

    Patched from interstellar space

    Moved code reaches the spacecraft and engineering data comes back; science follows by June.1112

  17. 2026-08 · V2

    The Big Bang

    Engineers swap powered devices for lower-power ones at once, buying at least another year of science.15

  18. 2026-11-18 · V1 · AHEAD

    One light-day

    The first human-made object one light-day from Earth.5

The Golden Record

A letter to whoever finds it

Each Voyager carries a 12-inch gold-plated record of sounds and images from Earth, chosen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. The cover shows how to play it, and where we are among the pulsars.89

“This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings.”

President Jimmy Carter, July 29, 197710
Images
115
Languages
55
Music
90 min
Speed
16⅔ rpm
Pulsars mapped
14
Clock
U-238

Plus greetings, sounds of Earth, and a uranium-238 sample to date the record.89

The spacecraft

Built in the seventies, still on the clock

Mass2
721.9 kg
High-gain antenna78
3.7 m
Power at launch2
3 RTGs × 158 W
Power lost each year8
about 4 W
Data rate to Earth7
160 bit/s
Commands to Voyager7
16 bit/s
Science instruments7
10

At 160 bits a second

one camera frame 800 × 800 px × 8 bit = 5,120,000 bits ÷ 160 bit/s = 8h 53m 20s

That’s one uncompressed picture, if the cameras were still on. They were switched off after the family portrait in 1990.7816

Running on less

Each probe’s plutonium generators lose about 4 watts a year, so the team turns things off in an order agreed long ago. Seven of Voyager 1’s ten instruments are now off; Voyager 2 runs three.81415

  • 2025-02-25 · V1 · cosmic ray subsystem off13
  • 2025-03-24 · V2 · low-energy charged particles off13
  • 2026-04-17 · V1 · low-energy charged particles off14

Sources

  1. 1. NASA Science, “Voyager Mission Fact Sheet”
  2. 2. NASA Science, “Voyager 1”
  3. 3. NASA Science, “Voyager 2”
  4. 4. NASA JPL, Dec. 10, 2018, “NASA’s Voyager 2 Probe Enters Interstellar Space”
  5. 5. NASA Science, “What Is a Light-Day?”
  6. 6. NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics, “Horizons System”
  7. 7. NASA Science, “Voyager Spacecraft”
  8. 8. NASA Science, “Voyager Frequently Asked Questions”
  9. 9. NASA Science, “Golden Record Contents”
  10. 10. The American Presidency Project, July 29, 1977, “Voyager Spacecraft Statement by the President”
  11. 11. NASA JPL, Apr. 22, 2024, “NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth”
  12. 12. NASA Science, June 13, 2024, “Voyager 1 Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments”
  13. 13. NASA JPL, Mar. 5, 2025, “NASA Turns Off 2 Voyager Science Instruments to Extend Mission”
  14. 14. NASA JPL, Apr. 2026, “NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating”
  15. 15. NASA Science, Aug. 4, 2026, “NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission”
  16. 16. PDS Ring-Moon Systems Node, “Voyager 2 Narrow Angle Camera Description”
  17. 17. Wikipedia, “Voyager 1”

Live distances: NASA JPL Horizons daily ephemerides, interpolated to the moment the page loaded and counted forward in your browser.

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