Overview
- Voyager 1 will reach one light-day from Earth on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2026, at about 5:16 a.m. ET, making its radio signals take 24 hours to travel one way.
- One light-day equals roughly 16.1 billion miles and Voyager 1 is moving at about 38,000 miles per hour, so a simple question-and-reply with the probe will take about 48 hours round-trip.
- Mission operations are run by a small Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight-control team that sends commands about once a week and relies on carefully scripted sequences because of the long signal delay.
- Engineers have been swapping heaters and instruments and using other power-conserving reconfigurations to stretch the probe’s radioisotope power source, and they are still investigating a brief loss of contact from Oct. 18–20, 2026.
- Voyager 1 continues to return interstellar measurements and carries the Golden Record as a cultural artifact, but NASA warns that shrinking power and aging hardware will steadily limit contact and capabilities over the coming decades.