Voyager 1 to cross the one-light-day mark on November 18, 2026

NASA said Voyager 1 will cross the one-light-day mark on November 18, 2026. The spacecraft will be 16.1 billion miles from the Sun, 49 years after its launch.

NASA launched the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977. They used a once-every-175-year planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Six gravity assists between them enabled close views of the gas and ice giants and several moons.

By the 1980s, the two probes had separated at Saturn. Voyager 2 continued toward Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 took one more portrait of the solar system, excluding Mercury and Mars, and a final image of the pale blue dot.

Each spacecraft carried a Golden Record, a 12-inch phonograph record. It included spoken greetings in 55 languages, 27 musical tracks, 116 images, and other sounds from Earth. One of the spoken messages was Hello from the children of planet Earth.

The record used copper and gold plating, while its cover used aluminum. The cover showed the Sun’s location relative to 14 pulsars and included instructions for playing the record. It was electroplated with an ultra-pure sample of uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in August 2012 and November 2018. The heliopause is the boundary where the Sun’s solar wind meets the interstellar medium. NASA’s Deep Space Network communicated with both spacecraft and tracked them. The Canberra antenna tracked Voyager 1 at 25.80 billion km, or just over 16 billion miles.