NASA's Voyager 1 to reach historic 16 billion-mile distance from Earth next month

Fox News ^ | October 30 , 2026 | Catherine Stoddard

[Nateman]

Voyager 1 is now about one light-day, or 16 billion miles, from Earth.

[Nateman]

Voyager 1 has been traveling away from Earth at 10 miles per second for almost 50 years. On November 18 it will take one day for any signal sent or returned to reach Earth. This is the furthest away from Earth any man made object has ever gone..and yet people believe aliens from light years distance are visiting Earth!

[rlmorel]

Hahahaha, I love it.

My gosh-when did that Star Trek movie with “Veee Jer” come out-1979?

Heh, look at it now...:). Makes me feel old, but not in a bad way at all!

[E. Pluribus Unum]

One light-day!

Only 364 light-days to go!

[SunkenCiv]

🚀🛰️🌞

[Nateman]

The nearest star is 4 light years away. God definitely created a big Universe for us to use!

[butlerweave]

Ya , if you could go 16 billion miles in a day you would still be nowhere near anything ,LOL

[rlmorel]

And a really great way to, almost grasp, on a human scale, just how long a light year is.

Excellent. Nice job.

[Ezekiel]

On Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2026, at 2:16:07 a.m. PST, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft will be 16.094 billion miles (25.902 billion kilometers) away from Earth — or, the distance light travels in 24 hours, also known as one light-day.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/

(There’s a counter busy counting on that page.)

[Inyo-Mono]

I remember watching the Voyager 1 launch live on TV.

[Jamestown1630]

To be fair, a lot of those people who believe in alien visitation also believe that aliens may have learned a thing or two about space and time that we don’t know yet. They bend space-time, or pull off some other spooky action...

[Nateman]

If you could travel 16 billion miles per day you would be moving at 99.4% of the speed of light. For every 9.14 seconds that elapse for a stationary observer, only about 1 second elapses on the moving clock (or the moving clock advances at roughly 10.94% of the normal Earth bound clock would have.

At that speed you would reach the nearest star in a little more than 5 months ship time. 4 years Earth time.

[algore]

to be more fair, we humans believe we know everything there is to know about space time, mRna, physics, biology, politics and dimensional rifts, and of course how AI works

[Verginius Rufus]

Has Voyager 1's speed been decreasing as it gets further away from the sun?

Proxima Centauri is more than 4 light years away, so more than 1500 times as far from us as Voyager 1 is now.

The only reason aliens from other planets would want to visit us is if they found out about chocolate. So we have to keep that a secret from them if we can.

[Nateman]

...people who believe in alien visitation...

Our Solar System has plenty of unused real estate. I figure about 2 or 3 centuries before it could be considered settled territory. By that time our descendants will be ready to inherit the stars.

Thanks to Elon Musk some of the people reading this will live to see the first child born off Earth.

[Gasshog]

Was a Jr. in high school when it launched.

[Jamestown1630]

Reminds of Max Planck suggesting that physics as a science was pretty much fully developed - in 1924.

[Nateman]

...the only reason aliens from other planets would want to visit us is if they found out about chocolate. So we have to keep that a secret from them if we can.

Even to some creatures (like dogs) on Earth Chocolate is poisonous. We've been broadcasting to the Entire Universe since 1900. . Radio astronomers have been looking for that same thing and so far...nothing. One of the reasons that I don't think aliens have visited because even their radio signals have not been detected.

[Jamestown1630]

They may be so far beyond us, they aren’t looking for the primitive types of broadcasts we send out. Maybe they never even experiencedd that, but developed technologically in an entirely different manner.

[Reynoldo]

To be fair, a lot of those people who believe in alien visitation also believe that aliens may have learned a thing or two about space and time that we don’t know yet. They bend space-time, or pull off some other spooky action...

. We don’t know what we don’t know. 👽👀

[Larry Lucido]

Can we get it back? I forgot to sign that cosmic greeting card.