NASA shuts down Voyager Science instruments, more power cuts to keep two detections

The Voyager spacecraft has been cruising interstellar space for more than 47 years, collecting valuable data about the vast universe. All travels have caused losses to the farthest man-made objects, and the days of the spacecraft have been numbered. NASA engineers are resorting to scientific instruments on two traveler probes to keep two iconic missions.

NASA announced on Wednesday that mission engineers at NASA’s Cosmic Propulsion Laboratory shut down Voyager 1’s Cosmic Ray subsystem experiments on February 25 and will shut down low-energy charged particle instruments on Voyager 2 on March 24. If it weren’t for these energy measures, then the twin probes might have a few months left. Now both spacecraft have enough power to do it for another year or so before the engineer is forced to turn off the two instruments. This is a grim reality for popular interstellar travelers who have suffered quite a few malfunctions over the past few years.

“Voyagers have been Deep Space Rock Stars since the launch, and we want to keep that way,” Suzanne Dodd, JPL’s Voyager project manager, said in a statement. “But the power is running low. If we don’t turn off the instruments on every traveler right now, they may have only a few months of power to declare the mission over.”

The traveler is driven by the rotting p, which converts it into electricity. Aging spacecraft loses about 4 watts of power each year. To save power, the mission team has shut down any system that is deemed not to need to keep the task, including some scientific tools. Each Voyager spacecraft had 10 scientific instruments when it was launched in 1977, but now only three are left.

Collecting data during planetary flights is necessary, and some of these instruments are necessary. But once the two spacecraft have completed their exploration of the solar system planets, the instruments are turned off. Voyager 1 reached the beginning of interstellar space in 2012, while Voyager 2 reached the border in 2018, surpassing the protective bubbles around the solar system known as the Earth’s tier.

The Voyager spacecraft is then brought with instruments designed to study the Earth’s layer and interstellar space of the solar system. In October 2024, the team decided to shut down Voyager 2’s plasma science tool, which measures the number of charged atoms to save electricity.

The Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem, which closed last week, is a suite of three telescopes designed to study cosmic rays by measuring its energy and flux. According to NASA data, the data collected by the telescopes helped the Voyager team determine when and where Voyager 1 left Heliosphere. Voyager 2 plans to discontinue the low-energy charging particle instrument later this month to measure a variety of ions, electrons and cosmic rays originating from our solar system and galaxies.

Voyager 1 still has its magnetometer and plasma wave subsystem, and its low-energy charged particle instrument will be shut down next year. Voyager 2 will continue to collect data through its magnetic field and plasma wave instruments, while its cosmic ray subsystem is scheduled to be closed in 2026.

“Voyager spacecraft has surpassed their initial mission to study exoplanets,” Voyager program scientist Patrick Koehn said in a statement. “Every other data we collect since then is not only a valuable reward science for Heliophysics, but also a testament to the exemplary engineering of entering Voyagers – starting nearly 50 years ago and continuing to this day.”

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and its twin detector, Voyager 2, embarked on a journey to space. The spacecraft went faster, leaving the asteroid belt earlier than its twins and making close contact with Jupiter and Saturn, where it found two Jovian Moons, Thebe and Metis, as well as five new moons, as well as a new ring called G-Ring, called G-Ring. Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977, the trajectory of natural gas giants Jupiter and Saturn leading to the solar system, and explored the icy giants Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) from the Earth, while Voyager 2 is more than 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers).

With current energy support programs, NASA engineers believe that dual spacecraft can continue to operate through the 2030s through each instrument. “Every minute of the day, travelers explore an area without spacecraft,” JPL’s Voyager project scientist Linda Spilker said in a statement. “This also means that every day may be our last.”