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Voyager 1 is about to reach a distance no spacecraft ever has.On November 13, 2026, Voyager 1 will reach a distance that light covers in a single day – 16 billion miles (25.9 billion kilometers) from Earth. It's the first human-made object to travel that far.Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has been flying for nearly five decades. It’s passed the outer planets, crossed the heliopause, and is now drifting through interstellar space at around 38,000 miles per hour (61,000 kilometers per hour). At that speed, it takes signals nearly 24 hours to reach Earth – matching the time it takes light to travel the same distance.This is more than a milestone. It's a real-world demonstration of the vastness of space. It took us 50 years to go where light goes in a day.After this point, Voyager 1 will never again be within a single light-day of Earth. Its distance will only grow. Eventually, it will pass through the Oort Cloud – a shell of icy bodies thought to mark the boundary of the solar system. That journey alone will take another few hundred years.Barring damage, Voyager will continue flying for tens of thousands of years. It’s expected to pass within 1.7 light-years of Gliese 445, a red dwarf star, in about 40,000 years. Another flyby – this time with TYC 3135-52-1 – is expected in about 303,000 years.And unless it collides with a star – a statistically rare event – it will drift through the Milky Way indefinitely, carrying its golden record, a time capsule of life on Earth.Voyager won’t return data forever. Its power supply is expected to shut down sometime in the early 2030s. But its voyage is far from over. It may be quiet. But it’s still going.📸Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)