November 13, 2026: This is the date on which an object built by humans will be one light day away from Earth for the first time in history. We are talking about the Voyager 1 probe, which at the time of writing it floats at 23 hours, 29 minutes and 47 light seconds away, and will take another year to travel the last half hour needed to complete the day.
Not the first record. Departed on 5 September 1977 from the Cape Canaveral launch base, the Voyager 1 probe is currently located approximately 169.5 AU (astronomical units) from our planet, a distance equal to over 25 billion kilometres, and traveling at more than 62,000 km/h. It already holds several records: it was the first spacecraft to have surpassed the heliosphere, crossed the heliopause (the boundary of the heliosphere) and entered interstellar space.
November 13, 2026, the date on which – esteem Alfredo Carpineti, astronomer and journalist of the IFLScience magazine – the probe will be 24 light hours away from us, a distance equal to 25.9 billion kilometers will separate us from Voyager 1, covered in almost fifty years (and this makes us understand how slow we are, compared to light).
And then? The Voyager 1 probe will continue its journey until, estimated at the beginning of the 1930s, its engines shut down: from that moment NASA will no longer be able to follow it, but it will continue to move away from Earth. After leaving the Solar System, it will enter the Oort Cloud, a spherical region that contains trillions of small icy objects and extends up to one to two light years away from the Sun. “The Voyager 1 probe will take about 300 years to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and perhaps about 30,000 years to completely cross it,” explains NASA.
