On 18 November 2026 a probe built in the 1970s becomes the first human object a full light-day from Earth. Here is every step of how it got that far.
Voyager 1 left Cape Canaveral 16 days after its twin, but on a faster track. By that December it had overtaken Voyager 2 and never gave the lead back.
It swept within 350,000 km of Jupiter, clocked the winds inside the Great Red Spot and found the faint ring nobody knew Jupiter had.
Three days later an engineer spotted a plume in a routine navigation frame of Io — the first active volcano ever seen off Earth. Over 400 are known there now.
Passing 124,000 km above the cloud tops, it resolved Saturn's rings into thousands of separate ringlets — structure no telescope on Earth could pull apart.
To study hazy Titan up close, controllers bent the flight path north, out of the plane the planets orbit in. The price: Voyager 1 would never see Uranus or Neptune.
From 6 billion km it turned around and photographed Earth as a speck smaller than a single pixel. The cameras were switched off afterwards to save power.
Plasma readings showed it had crossed the heliopause — the outer edge of the Sun's magnetic bubble. It became the first spacecraft in interstellar space.
Its nuclear generators shed about four watts every year. Of ten original instruments, two still run: the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem.
At 16,094,799,096 miles, a command sent from Earth needs a full day to arrive — and a full day for any answer to come back. Nothing built by us has been that far.
Its transmitter runs on 23 watts, no brighter than a dim bulb, and Earth still hears it. Power fails in the 2030s. The golden record aboard will outlast all of us.