Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
After nearly 50 years of blasting through space, old age is starting to take its toll on the Voyager spacecraft, and their long-distance relationship with Earth is feeling the strain. But thanks to a recent engineering tweak, one of the probes has just extended its potential lifespan once again.
Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators. These are small devices that convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity to create a steady stream of energy, ideal for long-term missions like this.
But both probes are now losing about 4 watts of power each year as their plutonium supply runs dry.
Back at ground control, NASA engineers have helped manage this problem by turning off non-essential gadgets. Some instruments, for instance, were used to observe our local planets and so are no longer of use now that the spacecraft have left the solar system.
Some instruments are still useful, but scientists were forced to reluctantly turn them off. For instance, both probes have shut down their Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment, which measured charged ions and particles. This tool proved incredibly useful once the probes moved into interstellar space, as it could collect information about the very structure of the interstellar medium itself.
Voyager-2 lives to fight another day
In the latest move, NASA announced on August 4 that they'd successfully powered down two more devices aboard Voyager 2 and substituted them with lower-power alternatives while ensuring the spacecraft remains warm enough to run in interstellar space, which has a baseline background temperature of about 2.725 Kelvin (-270.4°C or -454.8°F).
It's part of an effort known as "Big Bang." This switchover has ensured that Voyager 2's three remaining instruments — the magnetometer, Plasma Wave Subsystem, and Cosmic Ray Subsystem — will keep running as it cruises deeper into space.
The mission team plans to perform the same swap on Voyager 1, which is even farther from Earth than Voyager 2, in the months ahead.
The Voyager probes aren't giving up the ghost... yet
It's totally remarkable that the Voyager spacecraft are still running at all.
The pair were launched in 1977, fitted out with technology that's now around five decades old. The legendary Carl Sagan, who passed away in 1996, was heavily involved in the NASA Voyager project, including the Golden Records placed aboard the spacecraft, among many other technical aspects of the mission.
As of early August 2026, Voyager-1 is over 25.57 billion kilometers (15.89 billion miles) from planet Earth, while Voyager-2 is over 21.37 billion kilometers (13.28 billion miles) away.
At this rate, Voyager-1 is set to become the first human-made object to reach one light-day away from Earth on November 13, 2026.
All being well, the duo could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network until the 2030s, meaning Earth might be able to communicate with the spacecraft until then. Beyond then, however, the Voyager probes will effectively be dead to us (not to sound dramatic or anything) as they pass beyond the reach of contact.
While Earth won't be able to receive their signals at this point, their epic odyssey will continue. With no air and no friction in deep space to slow it down, the Voyagers will continue trailblazing through space indefinitely.
Unless, of course, they get stopped by a passing ship of extraterrestrial pirates, curious about the contents of the Golden Records onboard.
