The Long Goodbye: More Instruments Shut Down on the Voyagers as End Nears
1 min read
Summary
NASA has disabled two more instruments on its Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in a bid to extend their missions.
Last February 25, the cosmic ray system was shut down on Voyager 1, with the low Energy Charged Particle Instrument on Voyager 2 disabled on March 24.
Both spacecraft are already operating well beyond their original mission plans and design lives, with the next instruments likely to be turned off in the coming years as they continue to lose 4 watts of power annually from their RTGs.
Should this shutdown schedule proceed as planned, both spacecraft would only have their magnetometer and plasma wave subsystem still active.
These instruments could keep providing crucial scientific data until the end of the decade, or possibly even longer.
