Overview
- Voyager 1 will hit the one light-day mark on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2026 at 5:16 a.m. ET, placing it about 16.09 billion miles from Earth and extending its record as the most distant human-made object.
- At that distance radio signals need 24 hours to travel one way and 48 hours for a round trip, so mission teams must send carefully timed commands and accept multi-day waits for telemetry or replies.
- Controllers carried out a power-saving hardware reconfiguration in early September and recovered from a mid-October thruster anomaly that briefly interrupted contact, changes that now shape daily operations.
- With diminishing plutonium power and tighter watt budgets, engineers are relying more on the spacecraft’s onboard fault protection and on the Deep Space Network’s largest antennas to preserve science returns.
- Launched in 1977, the twin Voyagers reshaped knowledge of the outer planets; Voyager 2 is projected to reach one light-day in November 2035 and teams expect contacts to grow progressively harder over coming decades.