Voyager 1 & 2

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are twin spacecraft launched by NASA in 1977 to conduct a "Grand Tour" of the outer solar system, exploiting a rare planetary alignment that occurs once every 176 years. Together they transformed our understanding of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune before continuing outward to become the first human-made objects to reach interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, about a light-day from Earth: its radio signals, travelling at the speed of light, take about a day to arrive. Its one light-day moment is 18 November 2026 at about 10:16 UTC, the first spacecraft ever that far from Earth. Voyager 2 is more than 21 billion km away. Both still send data home with 23-watt radio transmitters, less power than a refrigerator light bulb. Follow both live on the Voyager 1 tracker and the Voyager 2 tracker.

Each Voyager carries a Golden Record — a 12-inch gold-plated copper disc containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, including greetings in 55 languages, music from Bach to Chuck Berry, natural sounds, and 116 encoded photographs. The records are intended as a message to any extraterrestrial civilisation that might encounter the spacecraft millions of years from now.

Both spacecraft are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) using plutonium-238, which produce electricity from radioactive decay. Power output decreases by about 4 watts per year, and NASA has been progressively shutting down instruments to conserve energy. NASA expects at least one instrument on each spacecraft to keep working into the 2030s.