Approaching its 50th year in operation, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe is set to hit one light-day from Earth.
On Wednesday, November 18, 2026, at 5:16 a.m., the robotic probe will cross the 16 billion-mile mark, as reported by CNET. Launched on September 5, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket according to WSAU, the spacecraft has spent nearly 49 years traveling through space. It is cruising at 37,763 miles per hour, a speed maintained since a gravity-assisted Saturn flyby in 1980, noted CNET. Walking that expanse at an average human pace of 3 mph would require an individual 612,015 years.
Joe Westlake—a space physicist and director of NASA’s heliophysics division—said the ways these spacecraft keep yielding new scientific findings concerning the interstellar space beyond our solar system. Voyager 1 was carried into space 16 days after the launch of Voyager 2, but overtook its twin within months.
Voyager 1 returned information about Jupiter and Saturn, and their moons, and it discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two previously undetected Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis. The Voyager mission is funded by NASA’s Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
Voyager 1 Reaches Interstellar Space
After completing planetary flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, according to NASA. Its twin, Voyager 2, took a different trajectory past Uranus and Neptune before entering interstellar space in 2018, according to NASA. Voyager 2 is expected to reach the one light-day milestone in November 2035, as detailed by Al Jazeera.
Traversing a single light-year will take Voyager 1 18,000 years, according to NASA projections, with roughly double that duration passing before it approaches another star. Voyager 1 is headed toward a dim star called Gliese 445, also known as AC +79 3888, and even at 38,000 mph, the spacecraft will need 40,000 years to pass within 1.7 light-years of it.
Situated at a distance of 4.24 light-years (or 24.95 trillion miles) is Proxima Centauri, the sun’s closest stellar neighbor, whereas the Milky Way’s nearest large galactic neighbor, Andromeda, resides 2.5 million light-years away.
Teams also resolved an unexpected loss of communication with Voyager 1 when the Deep Space Network did not detect the probe’s signal during two scheduled comms passes. Contact was reestablished on Oct. 20, and the team has maintained communication since then.…
Operating these geriatric probes requires creative engineering as their nuclear power sources decline. Powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators that convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity, mission teams have had to shut down several non-essential instruments since 2024 to stretch remaining power, reported Mashable India.
Engineers completed an initiative internally called The Big Bang on Voyager 1 in early September 2026. They shut down three devices and powered on three low-power alternatives to reduce overall energy usage while keeping the spacecraft warm in interstellar conditions, according to CNET and MLQ.ai.
A minimal contingent of NASA engineers manages the active probes, issuing instructions weekly, or more frequently if an anomaly arises. Alan Cummings entered the Voyager science team through coincidence at age 29—now 82—after a cosmic-ray balloon experiment that served as his Caltech doctoral dissertation missed its targeted northern Canadian landing zone and was destroyed.
Cummings was offered a job on the Voyager Cosmic Ray Subsystem instrument fairly soon after it began development in 1973, calling the mission the backbone of his career after analyzing data from it for 53 years.
“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, according to MLQ.ai.
Communicating Across a Light-Day
Because radio signals travel at the speed of light, communicating with the probe now involves a massive time lag. Suzanne Dodd, Voyager 1 project manager, described Voyager 1 as a national treasure to The Associated Press news agency. Commands and telemetry between Earth and the Voyagers are helped through NASA’s Deep Space Network, a worldwide network of massive radio antennas.
The mission also faced a communications scare in October when NASA’s Deep Space Network failed to detect Voyager 1’s radio signal during two scheduled contact attempts on October 18 and 19.
The signal returned on October 20, and engineers found that one set of thrusters had stopped operating while the spacecraft automatically switched to its backup thrusters as part of its fault protection system. Mission teams have not yet figured out what caused the communication issue.
“If you want to say ‘hello’ to Voyager, you send your message, and then you go home, and you wait two days before you finally get a response,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL.
Voyager 1 project manager Suzanne Dodd said Voyager 1 is a national treasure. Linda Spilker joined the mission aged 22. She said for The Times of India, “I just never imagined [the mission] would last that long.”
NASA organized public events to mark the milestone including “Shine Bright for Voyager’s Light-Day,” inviting people to flash the spacecraft’s call sign in Morse code using smartphones or flashlights after sunset on November 17, 2026, according to NASA.
Participants are invited to photograph or record videos of their light-day transmission and post them to social media channels while mentioning @NASA. Both spacecraft carry a Golden Record containing sounds, images, and greetings from Earth, etched with the Latin phrase “ad astera per aspera,” meaning “to the stars through struggles,” as reported by Mashable India.
“All of us — everyone on Earth — have been touched by these missions,” said Bill Nye in a statement reported by Al Jazeera. Launched on September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in space.
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