How far away is Voyager 1?

As of January 2022, Voyager 1 is roughly 156 AU from Earth — approximately 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion km). You can keep tabs on the probe's current distance on this NASA website (opens in new tab).

How far away is Voyager 1 in light years?

A light-year is 9.5 trillion kilometers. By division, that means it's going to take Voyager 17,720 years to travel ONE light year. That's 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years away.

How long would it take to get to Voyager 1?

Traveling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour, it will take the Voyagers nearly 40,000 years, and they will have traveled a distance of about two light years to reach this rather indistinct boundary. But there is a more definitive and unambiguous frontier, which the Voyagers will approach and pass through.

How long will it take Voyager 1 to reach the next star?

That's practically in our back yard, cosmically speaking. Voyager 1 will pass by Proxima Centauri within 16,000 years, while it will take 20,000 years for Voyager 2 to reach it, and 18,00 years for Pioneer 11 to meet our neighboring star.

How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact?

For example, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little over 2×10^(10) km, or 130 astronomical units, from the Earth and we still receive signals from it. Eventually we will lose contact with Voyager 1 when its instruments run out of energy to send signals to Earth.

How Far Have the Voyagers Got? What Happened to Them?

Will Voyager 1 ever leave the Milky Way?

It is doubtful that the spacecraft will ever be able to leave the Milky Way, as they would have to attain a velocity of 1000 kilometers/second, and unless they get a huge, huge, huge velocity boost from something unexpected, they will probably end up being in the Milky Way's rotation forever.

Will Voyager 1 ever stop?

Voyager 1 is expected to keep its current suite of science instruments on through 2021. Voyager 2 is expected to keep its current suite of science instruments on through 2020.

How long will Voyager 1 battery last?

Voyager 1 is expected to keep working until 2025 when it will finally run out of power. None of this would be possible without the spacecraft's three batteries filled with plutonium-238. In fact, Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power.

Can Voyager 1 still take pictures?

There will be no more pictures; engineers turned off the spacecraft's cameras, to save memory, in 1990, after Voyager 1 snapped the famous image of Earth as a “pale blue dot” in the darkness. Out there in interstellar space, where Voyager 1 roams, there's “nothing to take pictures of,” Dodd said.

Where is Voyager 1 now in Milky Way?

Voyager 1 in headed in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. In the year 40,272 AD, Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor called AC+79 3888.

Will Voyager ever hit anything?

The probability of Voyager colliding with any matter any time soon is unknown, but likely small. We have no way of detecting small outer solar system objects, because they are small and far away.

Can we see Voyager 1 with telescope?

Just as with the Apollo landing sites, actually seeing or imaging the interstellar probes is impossible: the spacecraft are simply too small (the transmitter dish on the Voyagers, for example, is only about 12 feet in diameter) and their distance from us too great, for any telescope to resolve them.

Will Voyager 1 slow down?

Voyager 1 is moving away from our solar system so fast that it could make it from the Sun to the Earth - a 93 million mile trip - in 3 months and a week. Both spacecraft are slowing down, but this is because they're still escaping the gravitational pull of our Sun.

Will humans ever travel at the speed of light?

So will it ever be possible for us to travel at light speed? Based on our current understanding of physics and the limits of the natural world, the answer, sadly, is no.

How long did it take Voyager 1 to leave the solar system?

After streaking through space for nearly 35 years, NASA's robotic Voyager 1 probe finally left the solar system in August 2012, a study published today (Sept. 12) in the journal Science reports. Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977, about two weeks after its twin, Voyager 2.

How long would it take to get to Pluto?

So how long does it take to get to Pluto? Roughly 9-12 years. You could probably get there faster, but then you'd get less science done, and it probably wouldn't be worth the rush. Are you super excited about the New Horizons flyby of Pluto?

What would the sun look like from Voyager 1?

The brightness of the Sun at the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes is about 6 lux and 9 lux, respectively. So if you were sitting on one of the Voyager space probes, the Sun itself would appear to be roughly as bright as a point on the sky at twilight.

How long would it take us to leave our solar system?

In astronomical terms, that is almost one light day. At its current speed, it will take roughly 15,000 years to cover one light year and will take about 40,000 years before the Voyagers come close to another star.

How far in space have we gone?

The record for the farthest distance that humans have traveled goes to the all-American crew of famous Apollo 13 who were 400,171 kilometers (248,655 miles) away from Earth on April 14, 1970. This record has stood untouched for over 50 years!

Does Voyager have fuel?

What sort of fuel are the Voyagers running on? The spacecraft actually carry two types of fuel—one to power the thrusters, the other to keep the electricity humming. The propellant is hydrazine, a simple concoction of nitrogen and hydrogen that smells like weak ammonia.

What happens when Voyager runs out of fuel?

Space ships do not stop when they run out of fuel. While outer space does contain gas, dust, light, fields, and microscopic particles, they are in too low of a concentration to have much effect on spaceships. As a result, there is essentially zero friction in space to slow down moving objects.

Will Voyager reach Alpha Centauri?

Neither Voyager is aimed toward Alpha Centauri, but if one of them were – assuming it maintained its current rate of speed – it would take tens of thousands of years to get to get there. Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars.

Will Voyager 2 ever come back to Earth?

In 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space. Then, in 2018, NASA announced that Voyager 2 had entered interstellar space, too. They are both headed outward, never to return to Earth.

What was the last picture Voyager 1 took?

The probe took the Pale Blue Dot photo at 0448 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990, just 34 minutes before its cameras were shut off forever. (The very last photos Voyager 1 took, however, were of the sun, Hansen said.)

How long would it take Voyager 1 to reach Andromeda?

... and even if we ignored that - it would need 3.3 billion years for the journey at the current distance. And that's just 3,299,999,980 years after the power supply ran out.