Concept preview. Not indexed. Facts are checked against the sources listed on each page.

Voyager 1: where it is and what it told us

The most distant object humans have made. Launched in 1977, still sending data from interstellar space.

Launched	5 September 1977
Crossed into interstellar space	25 August 2012 (heliopause)
Speed	about 17 km/s (61,000 km/h) relative to the Sun
Distance from Earth, late 2026	about 170 AU, roughly 25 billion km. It reaches one light day from Earth around November 2026.

In human terms

Shrink the solar system so 1 AU (Earth to Sun) is 1 metre. The Sun is a 9 mm bead. Earth is a speck 0.09 mm wide, one metre away. Voyager 1 is about 170 metres away, a long city block.
On the same scale the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 269 km away. Voyager would need roughly 75,000 years to get there, and it is not aimed at it.
At 17 km/s it is about 68 times faster than an airliner at 900 km/h, and it still takes light about a day to cover the gap.

What it found

Measured: we know this

Jupiter flyby, 5 March 1979: active volcanoes on Io, the first seen beyond Earth.
Saturn flyby, 12 November 1980: detailed structure in the rings and a thick atmosphere on Titan.
Pale Blue Dot image, 14 February 1990, taken from about 6 billion km.
In 2012 the plasma around it jumped in density, marking the crossing out of the Sun's bubble.

Inferred: we think this

The edge of the heliosphere is not a sharp wall. The boundary region is turbulent and complex.

Unknown: we do not know

What the space between stars is like far beyond the boundary.
How long the instruments will last. Power falls every year and instruments are being switched off one by one.

What would settle it

Keeping the radio link alive. Operators have already turned off several instruments to save power.

Sources

NASA Voyager mission pages (science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager). NASA/JPL Voyager mission status page for live distance. Concept preview: confirm live numbers against the NASA page before launch.