The Voyager spacecraft, launched in the 1970s, has turned off its plasma science instrument to save power for exploring interstellar space.
The venerable Voyager spacecrafts are now nearly 50 years old, and having headed out beyond the orbit of Pluto and into interstellar space, the pair are the most distant man-made objects in the universe. But despite their incredible longevity and success, they are inevitably running low on power, so their operations have to be tweaked from the ground to enable them to run for as long as possible.
Recommended Videos “Mission engineers always carefully monitor changes being made to the 47-year-old spacecraft’s operations to ensure they don’t generate any unwanted secondary effects,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in an update. “The team has confirmed that the switch-off command was executed without incident and the probe is operating normally.”
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