Digital Trends by Georgina Torbet 6/19/2022
The Voyager probes, the most distant human-made objects in the universe, will soon begin the process of shutting down. The two probes built by NASA were launched in the 1970s, and their decades-old hardware is still operating — much to everyone’s astonishment — but their power levels are falling every year. Now, NASA will begin powering off parts of the probes’ systems to keep them going for as long as possible.
Scientific American reports that NASA intends to start turning off some systems on both the probes this year. But the fact they are both still operating at all is incredible, given that they were originally designed for a four-year mission. “We’re at 44 and a half years,” Ralph McNutt, a researcher who has worked with the Voyager probes, said to Scientific American. “So we’ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things.”
The Voyager program was able to take advantage of a moment of cosmic coordination, when Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all lined up in such a way that the probes could visit each of these planets on their one-way journey away from Earth. The probes snapped images of Jupiter’s clouds, discovered new phenomena like volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io, and investigated Saturn’s rings.
More:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/space/nasa-voyager-powering-down/
