Five probes are on trajectories that will take them out of the solar system, and all five are still moving away faster than anything else humans have built. Distances below are from the Sun as of October 2026, in astronomical units; one AU is about 149.6 million km, the average Earth-Sun distance.
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Voyager 1 — 172.1 AU (about 25.8 billion km). Launched in September 1977, it crossed the heliopause in August 2012 and is the most distant object humans have made. In November 2026 it becomes the first spacecraft to be one light-day from Earth: its radio signal will take 24 hours to arrive. Its power supply loses about four watts a year, and NASA expects science operations to continue into the 2030s.
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Voyager 2 — 144.2 AU. The only spacecraft to visit all four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — and the second to cross the heliopause, in November 2018. Five of its instruments still return data, and it is the longest continuously operating space probe in history.
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Pioneer 10 — 142.1 AU. Launched in March 1972, the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt and the first to fly past Jupiter. Contact was lost in January 2003, when its radioisotope generator could no longer power the transmitter. It is heading toward the star Aldebaran, 65 light-years away, and will take about two million years to get there.
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Pioneer 11 — 119.4 AU. Launched in April 1973, the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn, in 1979, after a Jupiter gravity assist that bent its path out of the ecliptic. Contact was lost in November 1995. It is heading toward the constellation Aquila, and it carries the same plaque as Pioneer 10: a drawing of a man and a woman, and a map of where the spacecraft came from.
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New Horizons — 65.8 AU. Launched in 2006 with the fastest departure speed of any spacecraft, it flew past Pluto in July 2015 and the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth on 1 January 2019. It is still operating in the Kuiper Belt, and its power supply should last into the 2030s.
Light takes 24 hours to reach Voyager 1; the nearest star is 4.2 light-years away. The probes are the first objects to leave the solar system, but in stellar terms they have barely left the driveway.