NASA’s Voyager 1 has survived nearly 50 years and a light-day of travel from Earth — but in the end, there’s no question that a deadly combination of entropy and 1970s technology will eventually spell its doom.
With the intrepid little space probe running low on power, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made the decision on Friday to shut down one of its key sensors, a sacrifice that they hope will ensure that the rest of the craft will keep on ticking for at least another year. The sacrifice was the Low-energy Charge Particles experiment (LECP), which has been operating ever since Voyager 1 launched in 1977.
“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, in a NASA announcement.
Voyager 1, like its twin mission Voyager 2, runs on a tiny nuclear battery called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, providing a gradual drip of warmth that’s converted into electricity. According to NASA, the generators on both probes are now losing power at a rate of four watts per year.
On February 27, however, Voyager 1’s power levels unexpectedly plunged during a routine roll maneuver. Engineers feared that if they dipped any lower, it would trigger an automatic shutdown measure to protect the probe against an electrical fault. Recovering the probe, which is more than 15 billion miles away, after going into this shutdown state would be risky and difficult.
That meant cutting down its power draw. This was a scenario Voyager scientists planned for years ago by agreeing on the order on what parts of the spacecraft they would shut down, and next on the chopping block was the LECP. For nearly 49 years, the instrument has measured low-energy particles that originated from outside the solar system and even beyond our galaxy, illuminating the makeup of interstellar space.
The Voyager team sent a command to turn off the LECP, but not entirely: a small motor that keeps the instrument spinning will stay online, on the off chance that there’s an opportunity to bring the full thing back online again. It’s not entirely implausible: last year, engineers revived a set of Voyager 1’s thrusters after they had been deemed inoperable for nearly two decades. Of Voyager 1’s original set of ten instruments, two remain online: one that listens to plasma waves, and another that measures magnetic fields. The last instrument to be sacrificed was the cosmic ray subsystem experiment, which engineers shut off in February 2025.
“They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored,” said Badaruddin. “The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”
The time that shutting down the LECP will buy will allow engineers to prepare a more daring power-saving plan, nicknamed “the Big Bang,” which will involve swapping out a group of powered devices all at the same time, “turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.”
The plan will be attempted on Voyager 2 first, which has more spare power, before they try it on Voyager 1. As it stands, the tests are planned for this May and June.
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