Deep Space — Voyager 1 & 2, Live

WatchSat’s Deep Space view follows the two Voyager spacecraft — the only human-made objects operating in interstellar space, beyond the heliopause that marks the edge of the Sun’s bubble of solar wind. Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever built.

Why not TLE/SGP4?

Earth satellites are tracked with two-line element sets and the SGP4 model — a model of orbits around Earth. That math is meaningless for a spacecraft coasting through interstellar space, so WatchSat instead uses heliocentric state vectors (position and velocity) from NASA/JPL Horizons and extrapolates the live distance, velocity, and signal travel time in your browser.

Voyager 1 is approaching one light-day from Earth

As of 2026 Voyager 1 is more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth — so far that a radio command takes roughly a full day to reach it at the speed of light. NASA projects that on 18 November 2026 Voyager 1 will become the first human-made object to reach one light-day from Earth. WatchSat shows the live count toward that milestone, with the crossing date independently reproduced from the ephemeris.

Explore the solar system in 3D

The page also opens onto an interactive heliocentric view: the Sun, the eight planets and Pluto on their real orbits, and every spacecraft WatchSat tracks at its real position, drawn at true relative distance. Planet positions come from the astronomy-engine ephemeris and spacecraft positions from NASA/JPL Horizons state vectors, so you can click any world to fly to it, run time forward or back, and follow Voyager 1 from its 1977 launch to interstellar space.

The Golden Record

Each Voyager carries a gold-plated phonograph record — images, greetings in 55 languages, music, and natural sounds of Earth — a message meant to outlast the spacecraft by hundreds of millions of years.

The grand tour

Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980). Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to have visited all four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989). Both now return data from interstellar space.

The rest of humanity’s deep-space fleet

Beyond the Voyagers, WatchSat tracks New Horizons — still exploring the Kuiper Belt after the first-ever flyby of Pluto in 2015 — and the two Pioneers: Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and fly past Jupiter, and Pioneer 11, the first to reach Saturn. The Pioneers fell silent decades ago but still coast outward, each carrying the Pioneer Plaque — humanity’s first message launched toward the stars. See how WatchSat computes these figures in the methodology, or open the live globe to track satellites in Earth orbit.