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Yes—but New Horizons did not capture Voyager 1 as a visible object. On Dec. 25, 2020, its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photographed the star field at Voyager 1’s radio-tracked position. The probes were 11.2 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) apart, and NASA says Voyager was about one trillion times too faint to show up in the image. NASA’s account of the image explains what the picture does—and does not—show.
What New Horizons actually photographed
New Horizons pointed LORRI toward Voyager 1 on Dec. 25, 2020. The released image shows the background stars and the location where radio tracking placed Voyager 1. A yellow circle marks that position; it is an annotation, not an image of the spacecraft.
Voyager 1 was more than 152 astronomical units from the Sun—about 14.1 billion miles (22.9 billion kilometers)—when the image was taken. Its distance from New Horizons was 11.2 billion miles (18 billion kilometers). NASA describes Voyager itself as “about 1 trillion times too faint to be visible in this image.” In other words, the achievement was photographing the precise direction and star field of a distant spacecraft, not resolving the craft’s shape.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteNASA called it the first time a spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt had photographed the known location of an even more distant spacecraft. The image was possible because Voyager’s position was already known through radio tracking; it was not found as an independently visible speck. NASA’s image report and NASA’s description of the image provide the mission’s account.
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Why the distance is hard to picture
The 11.2-billion-mile separation was between the two spacecraft, not the distance from either craft to Earth. Voyager 1 was farther from the Sun than New Horizons, at more than 152 AU. The vast distances also make routine spacecraft operations slow: after New Horizons reached the 50-AU milestone in April 2021, it was nearly 5 billion miles from Earth. At that distance, a radio command took about seven hours to arrive, and controllers needed about seven more hours to confirm receipt. Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager, described the scale this way: “It’s hard to imagine something so far away.” NASA’s 50-AU milestone report gives the distance and communication timing.
Two spacecraft with different journeys
The photograph links two missions from different eras and with different destinations.
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| Spacecraft | Mission context |
|---|---|
| New Horizons | Launched Jan. 19, 2006; flew past Pluto in July 2015 and made the first close-up exploration of Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth on Jan. 1, 2019. NASA describes it as the fastest human-made object launched from Earth and one of only five spacecraft to reach 50 AU. NASA mission account |
| Voyager 1 | Launched Sept. 5, 1977; flew past Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and Saturn on Nov. 12, 1980. It crossed the heliopause in August 2012 and became the first human-made object in interstellar space. NASA’s Voyager 1 mission page |
Voyager 1 remains a science mission despite its age and distance. NASA/JPL reported on June 13, 2024, that the spacecraft had returned to normal science operations after a computer issue, with all four science instruments providing usable data. They study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles. NASA/JPL’s status update describes that recovery.
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The Voyager 1 image is sometimes easy to confuse with the famous “Pale Blue Dot,” but the images show different subjects and serve different purposes. In the Pale Blue Dot, Voyager 1 photographed Earth as a tiny point from about 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun on Feb. 14, 1990, as part of a 60-image solar-system family portrait. In the 2020 New Horizons image, the subject is the star field at Voyager 1’s tracked position; Voyager itself is not visible. NASA notes that Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and New Horizons have been capable of observations from such distant vantage points. NASA’s Pale Blue Dot account covers the earlier image.
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Why the image matters
The picture makes the scale of deep-space exploration unusually concrete: one probe aimed its camera toward the known position of another, across more than 11 billion miles. New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern called it “a hauntingly beautiful image.” Its significance is not that Voyager appears as a visible dot, but that a spacecraft far beyond Pluto could image the distant star field containing the radio-tracked location of an interstellar probe.
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