Overview
- NASA says Voyager 1 will reach one light‑day from Earth on Wednesday, 18 November 2026 at 05:16 Eastern U.S. time, a distance of about 26,000 million kilometers that no engineered object has reached before.
- At one light‑day any signal sent from Earth will take 24 hours to arrive and a reply will take another 24 hours, meaning round‑trip exchanges will require at least 48 hours and leave no room for real‑time fixes.
- Engineers reconfigured the spacecraft in September 2026 to cut power use and preserve science operations, and the mission team is investigating a brief loss of contact that occurred during communication attempts on 18–20 October 2026.
- Voyager 1 remains scientifically active with two instruments—the magnetometer and the plasma‑wave system—sending measurements of the local interstellar medium while its radioisotope generator loses roughly four watts of output each year.
- NASA is inviting the public to mark the milestone with a golden‑light Morse event the night before and the probe’s long career—launch in 1977, key planetary flybys, the Pale Blue Dot and the Golden Record—underscores the human and cultural reach of sustained deep‑space exploration.