Where is Voyager 2 right now?
Voyager 2 is currently about 21,424,010,448 kilometres from Earth, roughly 143.2 astronomical units, or 19.9 light-hours away. It is the second most distant human-made object, after its twin.
Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977, sixteen days before Voyager 1, and took the longer route. Jupiter in 1979, Saturn in 1981, Uranus in 1986, Neptune in 1989. It remains the only spacecraft that has ever visited the last two.
It crossed the heliopause on 5 November 2018 and has been in interstellar space since. It left through a different part of the boundary than Voyager 1 did, and it is heading south out of the plane the planets orbit in rather than north, which is why the map shows the two probes diverging rather than running together.
Its three radioisotope generators produced 470 watts at launch and lose about four watts a year. Instruments have been switched off to keep pace: the plasma science instrument in September 2024, the low-energy charged particle detector in March 2025.
On 4 August 2026 engineers at JPL ran a manoeuvre they nicknamed the Big Bang, shutting down several power-hungry components and bringing up lower-power substitutes in one command sequence, while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to work. It bought enough margin to keep the three remaining instruments running for at least another year. NASA intends to try the same thing on Voyager 1.