Where is Voyager 1 right now?

Voyager 1 is currently about 25,640,643,760 kilometres from Earth, roughly 171.4 astronomical units, or 23.8 light-hours away. A radio signal sent to it today would not arrive until tomorrow.

Voyager 1 on the live map, in its real position. Drag to look around, or open the full map.

Launched on 5 September 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in existence. It flew past Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, and a close pass of Saturn's moon Titan bent its path up and out of the plane the planets orbit in, which is why the map shows it climbing away from the ecliptic rather than tracking along it.

It crossed the heliopause in August 2012, leaving the bubble of solar wind that surrounds the Sun, and has been in interstellar space ever since. It is not out of the solar system in the gravitational sense; the Oort Cloud extends far beyond it, and Voyager 1 will take tens of thousands of years to clear it.

The spacecraft moves at roughly 17 kilometres per second, about 61,000 km/h, covering some 3.6 AU each year. It is now approaching one light-day from Earth, a distance no object built by humans has ever reached.

Its plutonium power source loses a few watts annually. NASA has been shutting down instruments one at a time to stretch what remains; a small number are still returning data on the interstellar magnetic field and plasma environment. Sometime in the 2030s the last of them goes dark, and Voyager 1 will keep going, silent, on the same trajectory.

Nearby on the map

Everything on the map