How far can Voyager 1 go before we lose contact

In 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe was launched to study the outer solar system. The two Voyager space probe have become the longest operating spacecraft in spaceflight history. 46 years later, Voyager 1 is now 23.816 billion kilometers (159.20 AU) away from Earth and is travelling at 60,000 km/h.

Visualized location of the Voyager space probes.

Despite Voyager 1 being the furthest man made object from Earth, we are still able to communicate with the space probe on a regular basis. But how far can it go before we can no longer communicate with it?

Antena of Voyager space probes.

To answer this, we need to know how Voyager 1 recives and transmit data from 23 billion kilometers away. A 20 kilowatt signal is transmitted from earth to voyager 1 using radio waves. It takes alomost 20 hours for th signal to reach the sace probe where it's sensetive antena picks up the signal. For comarison, it takes the rover on Mars an average 15 minutes to send messages back to Earth. Voyager starts sending data back to earth using a 20 watt signal. As it travels through space, the signal strength weaknens and by the time it reaches the Earth, the signal is barely detectable.

Deep Space Network's antena complex.

In order to communicate with objects that are this far away, it doesn't really matter how strong the signal is, as long as you have a rciever that is sensitive enough to pick it up. NASA uses the Deep space Network which consists of three antena complexes equally spaced arround the Earth ( Califronia in USA, Madrid is spain and canberra in Australia). Each complex has a huge 70 meters antena along with multiple 34 antena which can be combined to pickup signals that are thousends of times weaker than your standard FM radio signal.

The Deep Space Network spends several hours each day listening for faint signals from Voyager 1, and so far it continues to talk back to us. Since our methods for detecting signals has improved drastically over the past 50 years, there isn't really a limit on how far we can communicate with objects in space. With our curent technology, we could realiably communicate with objects that are many light years away from us, as long as our recivers are sensetive and accurate enough to pick  up the extremely weak signals. 

As Voyager tavels further and further away from Earth it takes longer to send and receive signals. The signal strength also gets weaker and data rates become slower making it harder and harder to communicate with the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 will continue on it's journey indefitely and although there is technically no limit to how far we can communicate, our communication with Voyager 1 only has a few years left. Since Voyager 1 is nuclear poweed, it's electrical power weakens each day.

Last picture of Earth taken by Voyager 1 before 32 years ago.

In 1990, in order to save the power, engineers turned off the spacecraft's camera after Voyager took the famous "Pale of Blue Dot" image, which showed Earth as a tiny blue pixel against the darkness of space.

The gold disc which contains messages for the aliens from the Earth.

Today, only 4 out of the 11 scientific instruments on Voyager 1 are still active. These instruments are being used to collect data on magnetic feilds, solar winds and cosmic rays outside our solar system. 

In arround 4 to 5 years, Voyager 1 will completely run out of power and will no longer be able to keep it's instrument going. Scientist will continue to communicate with the space probe and recieve the important informations it gathers untill it eventually sends its last bit of data and disappears silently into the space, never to be heard from ever again.

So alothough the end is near for the voyager space probe, we can appreciate the incredible jorney they have been on and valuable science they have taught us.