NASA's Genius Move to Keep Legendary Voyager Probes Alive

Only two human-made spacecraft are currently traveling through interstellar space, and their fuel supplies are running low.

Voyager 1 — initiated in 1977 and currently more than 15.6 billion miles away Earth — began with 10 scientific instruments, yet currently only three are operational after NASA switched off another device to preserve its limited atomic energy source. Later this month, the space The agency's engineers plan to deactivate one more instrument on its exploratory counterpart, Voyager 2.

Suzanne Dodd, who manages the Voyager program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated that 'The Voyagers have been deep-space celebrities since their launch, and our aim is to maintain this status for as long as feasible,' she remarked. The electrical energy is becoming insufficient. If we don't switch off one of the instruments on each Voyager spacecraft right away, they might only have a few additional months of power left before we'd need to conclude the mission.

Given this level of engineering diligence and expert troubleshooting It's possible that the Voyager spacecraft could remain operational until the mid-2030s.

You must commend the engineers.

The recently deactivated device is the Cosmic Ray Subsystems Experiment, which investigated cosmic rays — high-energy atomic particles traveling through space, generated by phenomena such as supernova Explosions. This device played a crucial part in determining when Voyager 1 exited our solar system. solar system Helius' sphere (a bubble of protective particles released by the Sun) sun ) and entered interstellar space in 2012.

The surviving scientific tools aboard Voyager include its magnetometer, plasma wave subsystem, and low-energy charged particle detector—the latter of which is scheduled to cease operations around 2026. Over time, the spacecraft’s plutonium power source will generate diminishing energy; it loses about four watts annually. For comparison, a typical toaster consumes between 800 to 1500 watts, yet remarkably, each Voyager probe operates using far less—only generates around 249 watts .

Voyager 1's mission will conclude once it lacks sufficient power to transmit signals to the massive radio telescopes on Earth. NASA's Deep Space Network , which are distributed worldwide.

These spacecraft have been venturing through deep space for nearly five decades, enduring intense bursts of radiation and flybys of icy worlds. Despite their durability and reliability as machines, they cannot persist without assistance. NASA engineers For many years, they have developed methods to maintain the functionality of these aged, radiation-damaged spacecrafts, staying connected through ancient onboard computers within the probes nearing their fifty-year mark.

"You must commend the engineers," said Alan Cummings, a cosmic-ray physicist at Caltech—the institution overseeing NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—told GudangMovies21 last year.

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