NASA just turned off another instrument on humanity's farthest-flung machine. Engineers have powered down Voyager 1's Low-Energy Charged Particles (LECP) experiment, which measures ions, electrons, and cosmic rays, to stretch the 49-year-old spacecraft's dwindling power supply and keep it operating in interstellar space for as long as possible, per Space.com. The probe, launched in 1977 and cruising more than 15.7 billion miles from Earth, slipped beyond the sun's protective bubble, the heliopause, in 2012 and is still returning data from outside that realm. So is its twin, Voyager 2, which is not quite so far from Earth at a distance of 13.2 billion miles, per USA Today.
The pair remain the only spacecraft operating outside the solar system, making their readings uniquely valuable. NASA expects both could continue operating toward the end of this decade. The space agency had long ago mapped out which instruments would be shut off first as the probes' nuclear power sources weakened. Of the 10 scientific instruments each spacecraft originally carried, just two remain running on Voyager 1; one registers plasma waves, the other gauges magnetic fields, per USA Today. The LECP instrument retains the ability to reawaken if additional power becomes available. Voyager 2's LECP was turned off in March 2025. That spacecraft has the same active instruments as Voyager 1, with the addition of a cosmic ray subsystem, according to NASA.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
