The Voyager Mission
Launched 16 days after Voyager 2, Voyager 1 is now the most distant human-made object ever built. It crossed the heliopause — the boundary where the Sun's solar wind gives way to interstellar space — in August 2012.
The only spacecraft to have flown past all four outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018, confirmed by a drop in solar wind particles.
One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the average distance from Earth to the Sun — about 149.6 million kilometres (93 million miles). It is the standard unit used to measure distances in the solar system.
Voyager 1 is currently more than 160 AU from the Sun — that is over 24 billion kilometres. At the speed of light, a signal takes roughly 22 hours to reach it. Voyager 2 trails behind at around 135 AU.
Both probes run on Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) that convert heat from decaying plutonium-238 into electricity. Power output has declined over the decades and NASA carefully manages which instruments stay on.
NASA estimates the probes will no longer have enough power to operate any science instrument by the early 2030s, though controllers may be able to receive engineering data for a few more years after that.
The heliopause is the boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by interstellar medium pressure. Beyond it lies interstellar space. Voyager 1 crossed it in 2012; Voyager 2 followed in 2018.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 positions are fetched live from the NASA JPL Horizons ephemeris service, which provides authoritative solar system body positions using precise numerical integration. Planet positions are computed client-side using the astronomy-engine library. All positions are in the heliocentric ecliptic J2000 reference frame, projected onto the ecliptic plane for the 2D view.