# When will New Horizons overtake Voyager 1 in distance from the Sun?

Basically, what the title asks. To my understanding, New Horizons is currently the fastest spacecraft that's moving away from the Sun, with arguably only Helios-A and Helios-B possibly faster still, but in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, so they won't make it out of the heliosphere.

So I'm curious, when will New Horizons traverse larger distance from the Sun than the Voyager 1 will in that time, and at approximately what distance?

I'm not entirely sure this can yet be calculated with any precision, since we don't know which Kuiper belt object will be selected for New Horizons visit after its Pluto flyby (or do we?), so feel free to make broad assumptions in your calculations.

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New Horizons will never overtake Voyager 1.

Although New Horizons is currently faster than any other man-made object, it won't be by the time it reaches the outer corners of the solar system.

Though New Horizons will also reach 100 AU, it will never pass Voyager 1, because Voyager was boosted by multiple gravity assists that make its speed faster than New Horizons will travel. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at 17 kilometers per second. When New Horizons reaches that same distance 32 years from now, propelled by a single planetary swingby, it will be moving about 13 kilometers per second.

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So New Horizons doesn't get any speed boost from slingshooting past Pluto? Or is the plan to even reduce relative velocity to assume orbit in the Kuiper belt? –  TildalWave Jan 28 at 11:54
Pluto is gravitationally tiny and won't have any significant influence on New Horizons' orbit. Perhaps a tiny correction but I wouldn't think so. New Horizons won't go into orbit anywhere. I don't know if they plan to use any fuel to slow down at all (but I could look it up). I wouldn't think so. –  gerrit Jan 28 at 12:09
The delta-V from the Sun's influence is the same for any probe (and proportional to $1/r^2$) , so you'd only need to know the probe's initial speed, and the delta-V gain from planetary gravitational assists to calculate the current speed of various probes. –  Hobbes Jan 28 at 14:13