NASA Powers Down Equipment on Voyager Probes as They Struggle for Life

There's more bad news for NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The twin space probes left the solar system in 2012 and 2018 respectively, and are currently over 15 billion and 13 billion miles from Earth. And their energy sources, on-board radioisotope power systems, are decaying quickly, forcing the space agency's Jet Propulsion Lab to shut down even more of the spacecraft's scientific instruments. According to a new statement, Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem experiment was shut down last month, while Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument will be shut down before the end of March. It's yet another sign that the spacecraft, which have been blasting through space for almost half a century, are on their very last breath. NASA has already had to be extremely conservative with the available power. The radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which use radioactively decaying plutonium-238 isotopes as a direct source of power, are losing roughly four watts of power each year, ... Read full article.