Where Is Voyager 1 Right Now?

Where Voyager 1 is right now

Voyager 1 is currently a little over 171 astronomical units from the Sun, which is roughly 25.7 billion kilometres or 16 billion miles. It gains another 17 kilometres every second, and it will keep doing so indefinitely.

The figures above are measured from the Sun rather than from Earth. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Earth moves around its own orbit while Voyager recedes, so the Earth to Voyager distance swings by about one astronomical unit over the course of a year, which is roughly eight light minutes either side of the heliocentric figure. Distance from the Sun is the stable, well-defined number, and it is the one NASA publishes.

How fast it is going, and why it cannot slow down

Voyager 1 travels at about 17 kilometres per second relative to the Sun, which works out to roughly 61,000 kilometres per hour and about 3.6 astronomical units per year. None of that speed comes from its engines. The spacecraft exhausted its useful propellant decades ago and now carries only small thrusters for pointing the antenna.

The velocity came from gravity assists. Close passes at Jupiter and Saturn stole a minuscule amount of orbital momentum from each planet and handed it to the spacecraft. Once clear of the Sun's meaningful gravitational influence, there is nothing out there to slow it down. There is no atmosphere and effectively no drag, so it coasts. Barring a collision, it will still be moving at close to this speed when the Sun dies.

Crossing into interstellar space

The heliosphere is the bubble of charged particles that the solar wind blows out around the Sun. Its outer boundary, the heliopause, is where that wind finally loses out to the pressure of the surrounding interstellar medium. Voyager 1 crossed it on 25 August 2012 at about 121.6 astronomical units. Voyager 2 followed on 5 November 2018 at around 119.

Neither crossing was announced by an alarm going off. Voyager 1's plasma instrument had failed years earlier, so the boundary had to be inferred from its plasma wave instrument, which measured the density of the surrounding electrons jumping sharply upward. Interstellar plasma is far denser than the thin solar wind inside the bubble. Confirming the crossing took months of argument, and the date was eventually backdated once the data was understood.

Talking to it takes most of a day

At this distance a radio signal needs close to 24 hours to make the one-way trip, so a command sent now and acknowledged immediately would not be confirmed for about two days. Every operational decision has to be made two days ahead of knowing whether the last one worked.

The spacecraft transmits with roughly the power of a refrigerator light bulb. By the time that signal reaches Earth it has spread across billions of kilometres and arrives at a strength measured in fractions of a quadrillionth of a watt. Picking it out requires the 70 metre dishes of the Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Madrid, and Canberra, which is a large part of why these two spacecraft are still in contact at all.

The Golden Record

Both Voyagers carry a gold-plated copper phonograph record, twelve inches across, selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. Each holds 115 analogue-encoded images, spoken greetings in 55 languages, a range of natural sounds, and about 90 minutes of music drawn from cultures around the world.

The cover is etched with playback instructions in diagrams, along with a map locating the Sun relative to fourteen pulsars. A patch of electroplated uranium-238 lets any finder date the launch from how much of it has decayed. The realistic odds of anyone ever recovering it are effectively zero, which was understood at the time. It was assembled anyway.

The Pale Blue Dot

On 14 February 1990, at Sagan's urging and over some internal objection, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 40 astronomical units and photographed the planets it had left behind. Earth occupies less than a single pixel, caught in a band of scattered sunlight.

The cameras were powered down permanently shortly afterward to conserve energy. It remains the most distant photograph of Earth ever taken.

How much time the mission has left

Both spacecraft run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which convert the heat from decaying plutonium-238 into electricity. That output falls by roughly four watts every year, partly because the plutonium decays and partly because the thermocouples themselves degrade. The budget has been shrinking continuously since 1977.

NASA has responded by switching instruments off one at a time, in a sequence planned years ahead, to keep the remaining ones running as long as possible. Heaters have been sacrificed to keep science instruments alive, and several components are operating well below the temperatures they were qualified for. Current planning expects science return to end sometime in the 2030s. The transmitters will fall silent well before the spacecraft themselves stop existing.

Where it goes next

Voyager 1 is not aimed at anything. It is leaving the solar system on a trajectory that was set by where Saturn happened to be in 1980, and it will drift through the galaxy for as long as nothing hits it. In roughly 40,000 years it passes within about 1.6 light years of Gliese 445, a small star currently in Camelopardalis. Voyager 2 makes a comparable pass near Ross 248 on a similar timescale.

Neither counts as arriving anywhere. At 1.6 light years the star would still be far more distant than the nearest star is from us today.

How this page calculates the distance

The figures are propagated from each spacecraft's published heliopause crossing, treating the motion since then as constant velocity along a straight line. That approximation is good at these distances because the Sun's gravity is negligible past about 120 astronomical units.

The model can be checked against a fix it was not built from. Voyager 1 is independently documented as having passed 100 astronomical units on 15 August 2006. Running this calculation backward from the 2012 anchor to that date gives 99.98 AU, an error of about 0.02 astronomical units across six years. Expect agreement with NASA's published figure to well under half an astronomical unit.

This page was built by Tiempo Software as a single static HTML file. There is no backend and no API call, so the arithmetic runs entirely in your browser and the page will keep working whether or not any particular service stays online.

Sources and further reading

• NASA: Voyager The mission's official home. Authoritative for status and figures.
• NASA: Where Are They Now NASA's own live distance readout. Use this to check the numbers above.
• NASA: Voyager 1 Spacecraft overview, instruments, and mission timeline.
• NASA: Voyager 2 The only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune.
• Voyager 1 Wikipedia. Trajectory, speed, heliopause crossing, and instrument status.
• Voyager 2 Wikipedia. Comparison figures and the Grand Tour encounters.
• Heliosphere Wikipedia. What the heliopause is and how the boundary was identified.
• Voyager Golden Record Wikipedia. Full contents, cover diagrams, and selection process.
• Pale Blue Dot Wikipedia. The 1990 photograph, its circumstances, and its distance.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are NASA missions operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This site is an independent project and is not affiliated with NASA or JPL. Distances shown are calculated estimates, not live telemetry.