NASA has plans to power down its Voyager spacecraft after four-and-a-half decades – here’s what you need to know.
The US space agency’s Voyager program consists of two robotic interstellar probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
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Initially, the two spacecraft, which were launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977, headed into space to study Jupiter and Saturn.
Their mission was only meant to last five years, however, the instruments have endured in deep space for nearly 45 years.
And since their launch, the probes have traveled a remarkable 14.46 billion miles from Earth – further than any man-made object.
However, now Nasa has announced that the Voyager program is coming to an end, as the two spacecraft are entering their very final phase.
“We’re at 44 and a half years, so we’ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things,” Nasa physicist Ralph McNutt told Scientific American.
By 2025, both vehicles, which run via radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are expected to run out of power.
In the meantime, Nasa has been eliminating features to keep the machines operating until then.
“Because of this diminishing electrical power, the Voyager team has had to prioritize which instruments to keep on and which to turn off,” Nasa said on its Voyager webpage.
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“Heaters and other spacecraft systems have also been turned off one by one as part of power management.”
After careful assessment, the Voyager team has chosen to keep operating the instruments that are “most likely to send back key data about the heliosphere and interstellar space,” Nasa added.
“If everything goes really well, maybe we can get the missions extended into the 2030s,” Linda Spilker, who started working on the Voyager missions before they launched, told Scientific American.
“It just depends on the power. That’s the limiting point.”
At the time of publishing, Voyager 1 only has four functioning instruments left, and Voyager 2 has five, Sky News reported.
While the powering down of Voyager will be a sad loss for Nasa, here are some of the probes’ most iconic discoveries.
Planetary tour
Collectively, Voyager 1 and 2 have explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
The instruments have also helped study 48 of their moons; and planetary systems of rings and magnetic fields.
Voyager 1 also carries a copy of the Golden Record, which is a message from humanity to the cosmos that includes greetings in 55 languages, pictures of people and places on Earth, and music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry.
Voyager 1 discoveries
Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere, defined by Nasa as “the boundary where the influences outside our solar system are stronger than those from our Sun.”
The probe also discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis.
Meanwhile, at Saturn, Voyager 1 uncovered five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.
And on Feb. 14, 1990, Voyager 1’s cameras captured the first “portrait” of our solar system, as seen from the outside.
A compilation of the images captured became known as the “Pale Blue Dot” – made famous by the late Cornell University professor and Voyager science team member Carl Sagan.
Voyager 2 discoveries
In December 2018, the spacecraft joined Voyager 1 as the two only human-made objects to enter the space between the stars.
The craft is also the only one to study all four of the solar system’s giant planets at close range.
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Because of Voyager 2, we were able to discover the 14th moon at Jupiter, and 10 new moons and two new rings at Uranus.
Voyager 2 is also the first human-made object to do a flyby of Neptune, where the instrument discovered five moons, four rings, and a “Great Dark Spot.”
