NASA Powers Down Voyager Instruments to Extend Historic Interstellar Mission

NASA's historic Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest-reaching machines, are powering down select instruments to extend their groundbreaking missions in interstellar space [1][2].

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena commanded Voyager 1 to shut down its cosmic ray subsystem on February 25, 2025. Voyager 2 will have its low-energy charged particle instrument deactivated on March 24, leaving each probe with three functioning instruments [1].

The twin probes, launched in 1977, are now operating at unprecedented distances - Voyager 1 at 15 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) and Voyager 2 at 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth. Both spacecraft are losing approximately 4 watts of power annually from their plutonium-powered electrical systems [2].

'The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible,' said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL. 'But electrical power is running low. If we don't turn off an instrument on each Voyager now, they would probably have only a few more months of power before we would need to declare end of mission.' [1]

The probes will continue operating with their plasma wave subsystems and magnetometers. NASA projects the spacecraft could potentially continue collecting data into the 2030s with at least one functioning instrument each [2].

Both Voyagers remain the only human-made objects operating beyond the heliosphere - the Sun's magnetic bubble. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018 [3].