how many miles per second os voyager traveling
How Fast Is Voyager Traveling?
Voyager 1 is traveling at about 11 miles per second (roughly 17 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun, while Voyager 2 is moving slightly slower at under 10 miles per second (about 9.6 miles per second).
These speeds have remained remarkably consistent for decades as the twin spacecraft coast through interstellar space, having completed their grand tours of the outer planets in the 1970s and 1980s.
Breaking Down the Numbers
Voyager 1 Speed
- Approximately 11 miles per second (10.6–11 mi/s depending on source)
- About 38,000–39,000 miles per hour
- Roughly 17 kilometers per second
- Adds about 3.5 astronomical units (AU) to its distance from the Sun every year
Voyager 2 Speed
- Under 10 miles per second (approximately 9.6 mi/s)
- About 15.5 kilometers per second
- Positioned somewhat closer to the Sun than Voyager 1
Context: How Fast Is That, Really?
To put this in perspective:
- Light travels at 186,000 miles per second — so Voyager 1 is moving at about 0.006% the speed of light
- Despite covering over 14 billion miles from Earth, it would still take tens of thousands of years to reach even the nearest stars
- Light from Earth takes over 20 hours to reach Voyager 1, but the spacecraft itself has taken nearly 50 years to get there (launched in 1977)
Why the Different Speeds?
The two Voyagers traveled different trajectories during their planetary flybys:
- Voyager 1 took a faster route, visiting Jupiter and Saturn before being flung upward out of the solar system's plane
- Voyager 2 followed a longer grand tour, visiting all four outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), which left it on a slower but still interstellar trajectory
Both spacecraft are now in interstellar space , having crossed the heliopause (the boundary where the Sun's influence gives way to interstellar medium) — Voyager 1 in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Fun Fact: Science Fiction vs. Reality
If you're a Star Trek: Voyager fan, you might recall Tom Paris claiming the ship could travel at "4 billion miles per second" at warp 9.9. That's science fiction — real Voyager travels at a mere 11 miles per second, which is still incredible by human standards but nowhere near light speed!
TL;DR: Voyager 1 cruises at ~11 miles/second; Voyager 2 at ~9.6 miles/second. Both are the farthest human-made objects from Earth, but even at those speeds, interstellar travel remains a multigenerational endeavor.
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.