Where Is Voyager 1 Now? One Light-Day From Earth on November 18

Where is Voyager 1 now? NASA’s Voyager 1 is more than 16 billion miles from Earth and will reach one light-day away on Wednesday, November 18, 2026, at 5:16:07 a.m. EST (10:16:07 UTC). At that second, the probe launched in 1977 will be 16,094,799,096 miles (25,902,068,356 kilometers) from Earth, the first human-made object ever to get that far.

The milestone is symbolic. Nothing about the spacecraft’s work changes on November 18, but it puts a simple, very large number on how far a 1970s machine has traveled in 49 years, two months and 11 days.

Where Is Voyager 1 Now and How Fast Is It Going?

Voyager 1 is in interstellar space, outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields that the Sun blows around the solar system. It crossed that boundary in August 2012, and its twin Voyager 2 followed in November 2018. They remain the only two spacecraft ever to operate out there.

The probe moves at nearly 38,000 mph (about 61,000 km/h) relative to the Sun. NASA runs a live “cosmic odometer” on its Where Are Voyager 1 and 2 Now page, which counts the miles for both spacecraft by the second.

Voyager 1 is heading toward Gliese 445 (also cataloged as AC +79 3888), a faint star more than 17 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Minor. Even at its current speed, the probe will only pass within about 1.7 light-years of that star, roughly 40,000 years from now.

What Is a Light-Day?

A light-day is a unit of distance, not time: it is how far light travels in 24 hours. Light covers about 186,000 miles every second, which adds up to a little over 16 billion miles in a day. NASA’s light-day explainer puts that distance in context with a few familiar comparisons:

• The Moon: about 1.3 light-seconds from Earth (238,855 miles on average).
• The Sun: about 8 minutes and 20 seconds away at light speed (93 million miles).
• Mars: between 3 and 22 light-minutes, depending on where both planets are in their orbits.
• Neptune: about 4 light-hours and 10 light-minutes from Earth on average.

In other words, Voyager 1 will soon be almost six times farther from us than Neptune, the most distant planet in the solar system. A light-year, by comparison, is about 5.88 trillion miles, and the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away.

Why the Distance Matters for NASA’s Engineers

Radio signals travel at the speed of light. Once Voyager 1 passes the one light-day mark, a command sent from NASA’s Deep Space Network will take a full day to reach the probe, and its reply will take another day to come back. Every fix therefore takes at least two days to confirm.

That delay already shaped the team’s most recent scare. In October, Voyager 1 went silent for 48 hours before its signal returned, as we reported when NASA restored contact with Voyager 1 and explained its power-saving overhaul.

Which Instruments Still Work on Voyager 1?

Voyager 1 runs on radioisotope power: generators that turn heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. That output shrinks every year, so NASA has been switching instruments off one by one to keep the spacecraft alive.

According to NASA’s mission status, the cosmic ray subsystem was turned off on February 25, 2025, and the low-energy charged particles instrument followed on April 17, 2026. Its cameras have been off since 1990. Today, Voyager 1 still returns science data from two instruments: the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem.

NASA has not given a firm date for when Voyager 1 will fall silent for good. The mission has recovered from several serious problems before, but every year brings less power and less room for error.

When Will Voyager 2 Reach One Light-Day?

Voyager 2 actually launched 16 days before Voyager 1 in 1977, but it took a slower route that included flybys of Uranus and Neptune. It traveled about 35,000 mph on the way and needed 12 years to reach Neptune. NASA expects Voyager 2 to reach one light-day from Earth in November 2035, nine years after its twin.

What Voyager 1’s Milestone Means

For space fans, November 18 is a good day to look up NASA’s live tracker and watch the number roll past 16.09 billion miles. Other long-running missions face the same aging problem, from the effort to save the Hubble Space Telescope to new missions trying to replace it. Voyager 1, still talking to Earth from interstellar space with two working instruments, remains the clearest example of how long a well-built spacecraft can last.