Voyager 1 launched in 1977 and is now roughly 16 billion miles from Earth, yet NASA can still communicate with it. There are no relay stations scattered through space and no satellites passing its messages back to us. Voyager points its 3.7-meter high-gain antenna toward Earth and sends a tiny radio signal across billions of miles to NASA’s Deep Space Network, where enormous antennas listen for it. The trip now takes almost a full day in each direction.
The World’s Slowest Internet Connection
Voyager 1 normally sends its science data back to Earth at about 160 bits per second.
Not megabits. Not kilobits. Bits.
For comparison:
| Connection | Approximate Speed | Faster Than Voyager |
|---|---|---|
| Voyager 1 | 160 bps | — |
| 56K dial-up | 56 Kbps | 350× |
| Broadband | 100 Mbps | 625,000× |
| Spectrum | 500 Mbps | 3.1 million× |
| Fast 5G | 1 Gbps | 6.25 million× |
At 160 bits per second, Voyager is sending only about 20 bytes every second.
If Voyager were trying to send ordinary computer files, the theoretical transfer times would look something like this:
| File | Transfer Time |
|---|---|
| 1 KB text file | ~51 seconds |
| 1 MB file | ~14.6 hours |
| 5 MB smartphone photo | ~2.9 days |
| 100 MB video | ~58 days |
| 1 GB file | ~1.7 years |
Your phone could download something in seconds that Voyager might spend months transmitting.
And there’s another problem: Voyager is still moving away from us.
As the distance increases, its radio signal becomes weaker. NASA’s Deep Space Network can compensate by using enormous antennas — and even combining several antennas to listen together — but eventually maintaining the connection becomes increasingly difficult.
So five years from now, we can’t simply predict that Voyager will be transmitting at some particular slower speed. NASA may still manage to maintain the 160-bps connection through better reception and antenna arrays, or circumstances may require an even lower data rate.
Either way, every year Voyager gets farther away, and Earth has to listen a little harder.
The amazing thing isn’t that Voyager 1 has the world’s slowest connection. It’s that after nearly 50 years and 16 billion miles, it’s still connected at all.