Voyager 2 compared to a school bus

Only spacecraft to fly past all four giant planets; entered interstellar space in 2018.

Can you see it?

No small telescope will show you this one; it is here to be understood, not spotted.

How big is Voyager 2 compared to a school bus?

Voyager 2 is about as long as a school bus.

How far away is Voyager 2 from the Sun compared to the Sun-to-Earth distance?

Voyager 2 sits about 143 times the Sun-to-Earth distance from the Sun.

How much mass does Voyager 2 have compared to a school bus?

Voyager 2 has roughly one fifteenth the mass of a school bus.

Worth knowing about Voyager 2

Its size: dish antenna 3.7 m across; magnetometer boom extends the craft to 13 m overall. Sunlight takes 19 hours 50 minutes to reach Voyager 2 — and a little longer every day, because it is still heading outwards.

Why it stands out: Entered interstellar space on 5 November 2018. Like Voyager 1, it loses about 4 watts of power a year; engineers found a way to tap backup power in 2023, which kept an extra instrument running until March 2025, when it too had to be switched off. Both Voyagers are expected to keep sending back at least a trickle of data into the early 2030s — after their power runs out, they will keep drifting silently through the galaxy for billions of years.
The mission: Launched 20 August 1977 — a couple of weeks before Voyager 1, but on a longer looping path. It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989), showing that Neptune’s rings go all the way round, and finding geysers erupting on its moon Triton along the way.

Voyager 2 — Rendered from NASA’s model, not photographed.

The numbers

Longest dimension	13 m
Distance from the Sun	21.4 billion km · sunlight takes 19 hours 50 minutes

How anyone knows this

We know where it is because we track it.

Games it appears in

Which is more massive?

Show Voyager 2 in the model ☀️ Everything the Sun holds 🌙 Plan an evening outside