How big is Distance from Voyager 1 to Earth?

Voyager 1 is a NASA space probe launched in 1977, and as of 2026 it is the most distant object ever made by people. On September 20, 2026, it was about 25.7 billion kilometers from Earth. That is about 172 astronomical units (au), where 1 au is about 150 million kilometers, Earth's average distance from the Sun. The distance keeps growing, so any figure for it is true only on a particular date.

Distance

The distance runs from Earth to the spacecraft. Voyager 1 is moving away from the Sun at about 17 kilometers per second. That carries it about 530 million kilometers (3.6 au) farther from the Sun every year, or about 1.5 million kilometers a day.

Earth's own trip around the Sun adds a yearly wobble. For about three months each year, Earth moves toward the spacecraft faster than the spacecraft moves away, and the distance shrinks. In 2026 that happened from late January to late April, and over the year the distance ranged from 25.4 to 26.0 billion kilometers.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory works out the distance from a model of the spacecraft's path, fitted to its tracking data. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, about 300,000 kilometers per second. At the September 2026 distance, a command sent from Earth takes about 23 hours and 50 minutes to arrive, and a reply takes as long to come back.

Size comparisons

The distance is 99% of a light-day, the distance light travels in 24 hours. NASA expects Voyager 1 to reach one light-day from Earth, about 25.9 billion kilometers, on November 18, 2026.
Voyager 1 is about 5.7 times as far from the Sun as Neptune, the outermost planet, which orbits about 30 au out.
If the Sun were shrunk to the size of a basketball, Earth would be about 26 meters (85 feet) away, and Voyager 1 about 4.4 kilometers (2.8 miles) away.
Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun, is about 1,600 times as far away. At its present speed, Voyager 1 would need about 75,000 years to travel that far, though it is not heading toward that star.

The journey so far

Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 5, 1977. It flew past Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on November 12, 1980, and found new moons and rings at both. After Saturn it headed north, out of the flat plane in which the planets orbit.

In 1990, about 40 au from the Sun, it took the last pictures of the mission. They included the image of Earth known as the "Pale Blue Dot". On February 17, 1998, it passed the Pioneer 10 probe to become the most distant object made by people.

On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space. The heliosphere is the bubble of particles and magnetic fields that flows out from the Sun.

The mission today

Voyager 1 is heading toward Gliese 445, a faint star more than 17 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Minor. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 9.46 trillion kilometers. In about 40,000 years, the spacecraft will pass within about 1.7 light-years of that star.

To save power, engineers switch off its parts in an order agreed years ago. After the most recent instrument shutdown, on April 17, 2026, two science instruments were still working: a magnetometer, which measures magnetic fields, and a plasma wave instrument, which picks up waves in plasma, the thin, electrically charged gas that fills space.