Five spacecraft are on their way out of the solar system. Their distance from Earth counts up live, from NASA/JPL's trajectories.
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Distances on a log scale, so Earth's orbit and Voyager 1 fit on one picture. The lines are the real paths: see the bends where they swung past Jupiter and Saturn.
The farthest human-made object. Left the Sun's bubble (the heliopause) in 2012.
Distance from Earth now
25,820,816,894 km
1977-09-05
Launched from Cape Canaveral on a Titan IIIE-Centaur, 16 days after its twin.
1979-03-05
Jupiter: found the first active volcanoes beyond Earth, on the moon Io.
1980-11-12
Saturn and a close pass of Titan, which bent its path up and out of the planets' plane.
1990-02-14
Turned round 6 billion km out and took the 'Pale Blue Dot': Earth as a single pixel.
1998-02-17
Overtook Pioneer 10 as the most distant human-made object.
2012-08-25
Crossed the heliopause, about 121 AU out: the first craft in interstellar space.
2024-04
Sent clean data again after five months of gibberish: engineers moved code around a failed memory chip from 24 billion km away.
The Golden Record
A gold-plated copper record with 115 pictures, greetings in 55 languages, sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from Bach to Chuck Berry, chosen by a committee led by Carl Sagan. Instructions for playing it are engraved on the cover.
Running on decay heat
Plutonium-238 powers it, and the output drops about 4 watts a year; heaters and instruments are switched off one by one to keep it talking.
A tiny computer
Its computers have about 69 KB of memory between them, and it whispers to Earth with a 22-watt transmitter that only 70 m dishes can hear.
Where next
In about 40,000 years it passes within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445.
The only probe to visit Uranus and Neptune. Reached interstellar space in 2018.
Distance from Earth now
21,588,014,509 km
1977-08-20
Launched first, on a slower path that kept the option of the outer planets open.
1979-07-09
Jupiter.
1981-08-25
Saturn.
1986-01-24
Uranus: still the only visit, finding 10 new moons and two new rings.
1989-08-25
Neptune: the Great Dark Spot and geysers on the moon Triton. No craft has been back.
2018-11-05
Crossed the heliopause, about 119 AU out.
2023-07
A wrong command turned its antenna 2° from Earth; two weeks later a high-power 'shout' from Australia turned it back.
The Grand Tour
A line-up of the giant planets that comes round about once every 175 years let one craft swing past all four. Voyager 2 is the only one that did.
One dish can reach it
It is heading south of the planets' plane, so only the 70 m dish near Canberra, Australia, can send it commands.
The Golden Record
It carries the same record as Voyager 1: a message for anyone who might find it, with music, greetings and pictures of life on Earth.
Flew past Pluto in 2015 and Arrokoth in 2019, now in the Kuiper belt.
Distance from Earth now
9,870,079,795 km
2006-01-19
Launched on an Atlas V, the fastest any craft has left Earth (about 16 km/s).
2006-08-24
Seven months in, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
2007-02-28
A Jupiter swing-by shaved three years off the trip.
2015-07-14
Pluto, 12,500 km from its surface: the heart-shaped plain, ice mountains and a blue haze.
2019-01-01
Arrokoth, 6.6 billion km away: the most distant world ever visited, two lobes stuck together.
Pluto's discoverer on board
Some of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who found Pluto in 1930, fly with it.
Slow mail
The Pluto pictures took about 16 months to download, at a couple of kilobits a second.
A stamp that came true
It carries a 1991 US stamp marked 'Pluto: Not Yet Explored'.
First to cross the asteroid belt and visit Jupiter. Silent since 2003, still coasting.
Distance from Earth now
21,165,554,038 km
1972-03-03
Launched on an Atlas-Centaur.
1973-02
The first craft through the asteroid belt, which turned out far emptier than feared.
1973-12-03
The first visit to Jupiter, through radiation that nearly fried it.
1983-06-13
Passed Neptune's orbit: the first human-made object beyond the planets.
2003-01-23
The last faint signal; it has coasted on in silence since.
The Pioneer plaque
A gold-anodised plate with a man and a woman, the craft's outline and a map of 14 pulsars that points to the Sun, designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake.
The Pioneer anomaly
For years it slowed a tiny bit more than gravity explains. In 2012 the cause was found: heat from its own power source pushing on it.
Where next
It drifts towards Aldebaran, the red eye of Taurus, about two million years away.
First to visit Saturn. Silent since 1995, still coasting.
Distance from Earth now
17,689,578,768 km
1973-04-06
Launched on an Atlas-Centaur.
1974-12-03
Jupiter, 43,000 km above the clouds, then a swing towards Saturn.
1979-09-01
The first visit to Saturn, scouting the route the Voyagers would follow.
1995-09-30
The last contact, when its power ran too low.
The same plaque
It carries the same message plate as Pioneer 10.
A test for the Voyagers
Its pass through Saturn's ring plane showed it was safe enough for the Voyagers to plan their own.
Where next
It heads towards the constellation Aquila.
One astronomical unit (AU) is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, about 150 million km. Neptune orbits at 30 AU; Voyager 1 is more than five times as far.
Radio signals travel at the speed of light, yet a command to Voyager 1 takes most of a day to arrive, and the answer as long again.
The distance from Earth swings back and forth during the year as Earth goes around the Sun; the distance from the Sun only grows.
Trajectories: NASA/JPL Horizons, fetched daily and extrapolated by the second.