By the end of this month. A light day is the distance light travels in 24 hours — about 16,094,799,096 miles/25.9 billion kilometers.

For comparison, our Sun is only 8.3 light minutes away. The time in either case is how long it would take to get a message through.

So it is a long way off, the furthest ever. But in the context of the universe, says NASA:

That’s why light-year — how far light can travel in a year — is used to measure and convey the vastness of space. It’s about 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers). The closest neighboring solar system to our own, the star Proxima Centauri and its one or more planets, is about 4.24 light-years away (or, about 24.95 trillion miles, or 40.15 trillion kilometers). And the next-closest galaxy to our own Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is about 2.5 million light-years away.

Still, it’s pretty far for us humans!

At Discover Magazine, Monica Cull tells us

On Sept. 5, 1977, Voyager 1 launched into space, carrying recordings of music, human languages, and other sounds of Earth, along with advanced equipment to study interstellar space. Although it has collected a wealth of valuable data and images of the cosmos, one of its most famous images is the Pale Blue Dot of Earth.

Astronomer Carl Sagan, who worked on Voyager 1, suggested that the craft turn back and photograph Earth as it passed into the fringes of the solar system, according to the Planetary Society. The resulting image became the famous Pale Blue Dot that Sagan later wrote a book about…

Voyager 1 took that photograph on Feb. 14, 1990, and it was the last look it ever had at Earth.

“As Voyager 1 Nears a Historic Milestone, NASA Uses Clever Engineering To Keep the Probe Going,” Nov 3, 2026

The team is doing its best to keep Voyager 1 going as long as possible. But this is real life space travel, with real time and space constraints, not Star Trek.

Note from NASA: Voyager 1 wasn’t alone. “Its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, took a different path through the solar system after they launched in 1977, in order to visit Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 2 is on pace to be one light-day away from Earth in nine more years, in November 2035.”