alt Hacker NewsVoyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
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Wrote about the Voyager probes two days ago in my blog - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Not that we would literally do this with Voyager, but it makes me wonder at the potential utility of a string of probes, one sent every couple of [insert correct time interval, decades, centuries?], to effectively create a communication relay stretching out into deep space somewhere.
My understanding with the Voyagers 1 and 2 is (a) they will run out of power before they would ever get far enough to benefit from a relay and (b) they benefited from gravity slingshots due to planetary alignments that happen only once every 175 years.
So building on the Voyager probes is a no-go. But probes sent toward Alpha Centauri that relay signals? Toward the center of the Milky Way? Toward Andromeda? Yes it would take time scales far beyond human lifetimes to build out anything useful, and even at the "closest" scales it's a multi year round trip for information but I think Voyager, among other things, was meant to test our imaginations, our sense of possible and one thing they seem to naturally imply is the possibility of long distance probe relays.
Edit: As others rightly note, the probes would have to communicate with lasers, not with the 1970s radio engineering that powered Voyagers 1 and 2.
Wow, this gives a reflection about our future. The nearest potentially habitable planet known is Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri about 4 light‑years from Earth (at least it is in a habitable zone of its star) [1]. So we don't have a choice actually except protecting and make sure our planet survives. That's regardless if it really would be able to support life as we know or not (probably not).
The scale gets surreal fast: 8 minutes for sunlight, a day to ping Voyager 1, and then it would take Voyager 1 another 75000 years to reach the nearest star. Our entire technological reach is basically a rounding error at interstellar distances.
Too late for anyone to see this comment, and it's just a trivial bugbear of mine, but the article has this:
> "... meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it."
They don't mean "a full light-day" ... they mean "a full day". They're talking about the time it will take, and "light-day" is the distance it's travelling.
A trivial type error that a compiler would barf on, that people will gloss over and not notice, but which niggles at me.
Sorry ... I now return you to your regular programming.
Site is down? Archive: https://archive.is/55yNp
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
Seeing systems used in the most advanced areas of human civilization never fails to amaze me. They have been created half a century ago yet still functioning flawlessly in the autonomous, harsh environment of space. Meanwhile, I consider it a win if my Python API server survives a month without breaking. I'm always wondering, how did those engineers create something so robust, while I, despite standing on the shoulder of decades of software engineering progress, seem unable to avoid introducing bugs with every commit?
We are flying "faster" on earth.
You often hear about the fatality rate per 100 million or 1 billion passenger miles in transportation statistics, but over the last 15 years, U.S. airlines have averaged less than 1 fatality per passenger light-year traveled
50 years for 1 light day... so to arrive Alpha Centauri that is 4.2 light years far away... 76549 years and 364 days :-)
The Voyagers are just the beginning.
We can't see it yet, stuck as we are, in the present moment, filled with strife, failure, and disappointment. But the years and centuries to come will see us colonize the solar system, bringing new opportunities for millions, while easing the drain on Earth's ecosystem.
How can I be so sure? Because in the long arc of history that is what we've always done. We went from Africa to Asia to Europe and all the way to the Americas, founding cities and developing technology every step of the way. We launched into the Pacific, exploring island after island, eventually finding a new world in Australia. We have outposts on Antarctica and in low-Earth orbit. And I'm certain that, this decade, humans (Americans, Chinese, or both) will once again walk on the moon.
The people who launched the Voyagers believed that the future would come--they built a machine that would last for decades, knowing that people would benefit from its discoveries. Without that belief, they would have never tried it.
That's my lesson from the Voyagers: we have to believe the future will be better than the past, so that we can build that future. That what we've always done. We are all voyagers, and always have been.
> Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation. Compare that to the Moon (1.3 seconds), Mars (up to 4 minutes), and Pluto (nearly 7 hours).
These numbers aren't right...Mars is 4 minutes MINIMUM, but could be up to 22-ish minutes at the maximum distance between Earth and Mars. This is also one way, double that for communication and a response.
Once we develop a technology that will allow us to do a tour around our solar system within a day or so, catching up to Voyager 1 and 2 would be a neat way to wrap up the sightseeing trip before heading home.
Too bad none of us will get to experience it.
At current pace, Voyager 1 will have taken 49 Earth years to reach one light-day.
That means it will reach a light year in approximately the Earth year 19,860.
If Voyager could stay operational and keep its speed of ~61,000 km/hr, it would reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in about 72,000 years.
My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.
I wonder how long it will take for someone to get rich enough to be able to send their own private interstellar space missions. America's super wealthy are getting very rich. At this rate we will have multiple people with a trillion dollars by the end of the century. What is stopping someone from building and launching interstellar probes instead of buying another few super yachts.
I am curious, how are we communicating with it? like how do we know where it is right now, and how are we sending signals to communicate with it? won't our signal affected by noise or the like. When it is this far, how are accurately sending our signals to it.
Here is a funny thought experiment - the distance from Voyager to Earth varies by approximately 16 light minutes throughout the year. Why? Because it takes ~8 minutes for light to go from the Sun to the Earth, so presuming the Voyager is roughly planar with the Sun/Earth (I'm just assuming yes), that gives a variance of ~16 minutes depending on where the earth is on its orbit.
Now I'm presuming they aren't using the actual Earth position, but rather an average Earth position (which is basically just the Sun's position). Since Voyager is ~30 light minutes away from being 1 light-day away, that means this ~16 minute change can affect our 1 light-day mark by up to ~6 months!
This is an absurdly simplified article :/ Wikipedia is way better and more technical.
It is going to be difficult to service the probe at that distance, and probably they won't be able to find spare parts anyway.
The real mind-bending part isn't the distance, but the implications for deep space exploration. We've essentially hit the practical limit of real-time control from Earth.
So about 50*364 more years until it’s travelled a light year!
also discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908483
Where is the Earth in its orbit around the sun when this event happens? For half of each year, the sun is closer to Voyager 1 than is the Earth.
Also, does anyone know how long communication with the probe is disrupted when the sun is directly between them?
"I write code therefore space exploration interests me" - not me
I hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we send into the universe in the whole civilization.
Is there a way to bypass Voyager with a new craft in some reasonable amount of time if we put enough thrust on it
How long would it take to catch up with Voyager using the latest rocket technology and some highly optimized gravity assistance?
If obtaining speed was the only goal, how fast could we get something traveling in space with our current technology? That would include using gravity assists.
voyager isn't proof we can reach the stars, it's proof we can't and we launched it anyway. that's the most human thing we've ever done
We're never getting out of this solar system, are we?
How is the link with earth maintained at this distance? Is it really a powerful transmitter that sends signals without attenuation?
That old tech was so solid and reliable, I'm always amazed.
Now the question is, what time is it in voyager 1? With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now. I was watching star wars recently and when Han Solo casually say "we should be in Alderaan at 0200 hours", I paused for a second. What does that even mean [0]? Traveling through space is challenging today, but after we figure that out, we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy.
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
Can we talk about how awesome NASA's visualizations are for this?
What happens if Voyager decides to go back home?
Have we ever fully realized the lessons of the "Pale blue dot" photo? When will we stop the wasteful fighting and over-consumption and finally embrace a cohesive sustainable lifestyle together to protect the only life we know of in the universe.
Musk is now talking about near term putting servers in space, because that's where power will be cheapest.
Should this happen, we'll see many gigawatts of power in space. A spinoff of this would be large solar-electric spacecraft, or even large lasers for beam powered spacecraft. Either case should allow considerably higher delta-V than chemical rockets.
> Communicating with Voyager 1 is slow. Commands now take about a day to arrive, with another day for confirmation.
I found this a bit silly given the headline: "well duh, that's the theoretical limit barring fancy quantum entaglement nonsense or similar!"
TIL all electromagnetic waves, including radio which Voyager 1 [uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Communication_system), travel at the speed of light. For some reason I always thought we had satellites doing some slower process or needing to somehow "see" light photons coming back from the probe to achieve near-lightspeed communication.
november 202 6
Well - you gotta hurry up, buddy!
> After nearly 50 years in space
I mean, in the future this record will be broken, but right now this is quite epic. Go Voyager 1, go!
Show that the movie a space odyssey was wrong about what's out there.
"About to reach" - read 1 year from "now".
The article points that by 2030, we will lose comms with voyager. Is there a way to avoid it?
"is about"
"On November 2026"
I know it's like a nanosecond in astronomical time, but come on...
moon ping time 2.6 seconds
voyager ping time 172,800 seconds
1000+ years from now a ship will take off from earth or orbit and pass Voyager in a few hours (assuming the planet is not turned into one huge radioactive, forever-checmical ocean before then)
It really puts our current definition of "latency" into a painful perspective.
We have a machine running on 1970s hardware, a light-day away, that arguably maintains a more reliable command-response loop relative to its constraints than many modern microservices sitting in the same availability zone.
It’s a testament to engineering when "performance" meant physics and strict resource budgeting, not just throwing more vCPUs at an unoptimized Python loop. If Voyager had been built with today's "move fast and break things" mindset, it would have bricked itself at the heliopause pending a firmware update that required a stronger handshake.