Voyager 1 is a light-day away, and NASA's newest tool hunts worlds it cannot see

A light-day away

On November 18, Voyager 1 will become the first human-made object to sit a full light-day from Earth — more than 16 billion miles, or 25.9 billion kilometers, away. A radio signal sent from Earth will take 24 hours to reach it. The spacecraft was launched in 1977, which means a machine built nearly half a century ago is still answering, still the most distant object humanity has ever put in space, and still setting records. m:…2880

NASA is marking the milestone with public activities, and the distance is the point. A light-day is not a round number chosen for a press release; it is a measure of how far light travels in a day, and Voyager 1 is about to cross it. Every additional day adds another 24 hours of light-travel time between the spacecraft and home, and the probe keeps going. m:…2880

New worlds by gravity

While Voyager keeps going farther, NASA's next way of finding planets does not need to see them at all. NASA astrophysicists have shown that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, known as LISA, could detect a new population of exoplanets by the gravitational waves they create — ripples in space-time caused by orbiting masses. LISA is designed to detect those waves, and the studies show it could find worlds throughout the galaxy, not just near Earth. m:…7360

LISA is still in development, so this is a method, not a discovery. But the logic is what matters: every planet that orbits a star tugs on space-time, and a detector sensitive enough to feel the tug can find planets that no telescope could ever image. If it works, the catalog of known worlds grows by a population that is invisible to every other method we have. m:…7360

The crew comes home

The week also brought a homecoming closer to Earth. NASA is welcoming the Expedition 74 crew back at Space Center Houston after a long-duration mission on the International Space Station. The crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Chris Williams, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, and they will share their mission experiences at the public event. m:…7359

A six-person crew drawn from three agencies is, by now, the normal shape of the station's work — which is itself the story. The station's crews have been international for a generation, and the return of Expedition 74 is a reminder that the same agency running a probe launched in 1977 to the edge of the solar system is also running a permanently crewed outpost in low orbit. m:…7359 m:…2880

A boot print on Mars, simulated

NASA also released photographs from the second CHAPEA mission, its Mars analog, taken on August 31, 2026. The images show the crew arranged around a boot print in simulated Martian sand, part of the agency's research into long-duration human spaceflight. It is a small image — a boot print, not a footprint on Mars — but it sits in the same week as Voyager's light-day and LISA's exoplanets, and the three together say something about the agency's range: it is studying the next crew's habitat, the next telescope's targets, and the farthest machine it has ever built, all at once. m:…2547 m:…2880 m:…7360