Voyager 1 launch

Launched after its twin but on a faster path — today it is the farthest human-made object.

The moment of Voyager 1 launch: https://nowsky.org/e/voyager1-launch — opens at the right place and time, replayable, no login.

Available views: Orbit ✓ · Sky — (not visible in the sky)

The story

Voyager 1 left Cape Canaveral on 5 September 1977, sixteen days after its twin. On the faster trajectory it overtook Voyager 2 in the asteroid belt that December, and the numbering follows that order. Its destinations were Jupiter, Saturn, and then wherever nobody had gone.

At Jupiter in March 1979 it found the first active volcanoes beyond Earth on Io — navigation engineer Linda Morabito spotted a plume on the limb of an image — and at Saturn in November 1980 it chose a close pass of Titan over the Grand Tour, leaving the ecliptic. Uranus and Neptune went to Voyager 2; Voyager 1 headed out of the solar system.

On 25 August 2012 it became the first human-made object to leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space. As of September 2026 it is about 172 AU away — twenty-three and a half light-hours — still receding at 17 km/s and still transmitting.

Its heart is three plutonium thermoelectric generators. Output was 470 W at launch and falls by about 4 W a year, so the team has spent half a century rationing power, switching off heaters one at a time to keep instruments alive. The golden record on its side carries greetings in 55 languages and 115 sounds of Earth, including "annyeonghaseyo" in Korean.

Why it matters

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object and the only probe directly sampling the interstellar plasma beyond the heliosphere. Its data since 2012 gave the first look at the edge of the bubble blown by the solar wind, and combined with Voyager 2's crossing in 2018 showed the boundary to be blunt rather than pointed.

The discovery of Io's volcanoes overturned the assumption that small bodies are geologically dead. A paper predicting that Jupiter's tides melt Io's interior appeared days before the flyby, and Voyager confirmed it almost immediately. Tidal heating is now the starting point for the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus.

The golden record is a legacy of attitude rather than science. The odds of anyone finding it are effectively zero, but making it forced a single answer to the question of who we are. The same spacecraft took the Pale Blue Dot photograph in 1990.

How to watch

Voyager 1 lies toward Ophiuchus at about 172 AU and is beyond any telescope. Only the 70 m antennas of the Deep Space Network can reach it; a command takes twenty-three and a half hours to arrive and the reply as long to return.

The orbit replay draws the path from the 1977 launch past Jupiter and Saturn and up out of the ecliptic; follow the probe at high speed and the trajectory can be seen kicking upward at the Saturn flyby.

In the 3-D interstellar view Voyager 1 is marked at its current position beyond the heliopause, and the custom journey "Voyager 1 round-trip signal" shows that even at light speed a message to the probe and back takes 47 hours.

See this for yourself — replay the moment in the orbit view

Background

On 14 February 1990 it turned its camera toward Earth for the Pale Blue Dot and the 60-frame family portrait of the solar system, after which the camera was switched off for good. Observations since then come only from the magnetometer, plasma and cosmic-ray instruments.

In November 2023 a failed memory chip left it sending gibberish for five months. The team remotely dissected a computer 24 billion km away, moved the affected code to other memory regions and restored it in April 2024 — a repair on a 46-year-old machine.

By the late 2020s generator output will force instruments to be switched off one by one. Minimal contact into the early 2030s is the goal; after that, in about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 passes within 1.6 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in Camelopardalis.

FAQ

Where is it now?

About 172 AU in September 2026, toward Ophiuchus — twenty-three and a half light-hours away.

Why is it number 1 if it launched second?

It flew the faster trajectory, overtook Voyager 2 in the asteroid belt and reached Jupiter first; the names follow that order.

Is it still transmitting?

Yes. With power dwindling only some instruments run, but it still returns magnetic-field, plasma and cosmic-ray data.

Is Korean on the golden record?

Yes — "annyeonghaseyo" is among the greetings in 55 languages.

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Times and figures are approximate — verify with official sources when planning travel. Simulation uses J2000 mean elements.