Voyager

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched from Cape Canaveral in August and September 1977 to take advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets. Funded to study Jupiter and Saturn and built to last five years, they used gravity assists to go further: Voyager 2 went on to Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, and between them the two explored all four giant planets and 48 of their moons. The missions cost $865 million through the Neptune encounter.

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space on August 25, 2012, and Voyager 2 in 2018; they are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere. Both are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators that lose about 4 watts a year. Of the 10 instruments each spacecraft carries, seven have been shut off, most recently Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles experiment on April 17, 2026.

In 2026 a power-saving reconfiguration nicknamed “the Big Bang” kept Voyager 2’s three remaining instruments running for at least another year; the same change is planned for Voyager 1. On November 18, 2026, Voyager 1 is due to become the first human-made object one light-day—about 16.1 billion miles—from Earth.

Read more about Voyager

• Control rooms and antennas: how NASA keeps in touch with its spacecraftEvery NASA mission depends on a control room and a chain of antennas. Built for Mercury in 1961, the networks now serve more than 100 missions, and the deep-space antennas are booked beyond their capacity.
• Voyager to Dragonfly: fifty years of flying to the outer solar systemTwo 1977 probes beyond the Sun’s bubble, New Horizons past Pluto, Juno at Jupiter, Europa Clipper en route and a rotorcraft being built for Titan: what each found or seeks, what each cost, where each stands in October 2026.