NASA’s Voyager space probes, launched in 1977, continue to perform year after year. Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 2 is about 13 billion miles away.
The power systems on Voyager rely on the decay of plutonium and continue to provide electricity, however the supply is diminishing at a rate of about 4 watts per year, and this means power conservation plans need to be implemented to continue to operate the spacecraft.
Voyager 2 recently had its plasma science instrument shut down meaning that neither probe has this instrument in operation now. To preserve power on Voyager 1, the cosmic ray subsystem is being powered down, and soon the low energy charged particle instrument on Voyager 2 will be shut down.
These probes have been remarkable, logging far more miles than anticipated and outliving the initial mission objectives by scales of success. Considering the antiquity of the instruments, and even the ancient coding methods used by the onboard computers, this speaks volumes about American technology “back in the day.”
In a year or so, more instruments will need to be taken offline to preserve the mission in the hope that at least one instrument will be left operating to carry on into the 2030’s.
I am 62 years old, and I distinctly remember the launch of each of these probes when I was 14 in the summer of 1977,. Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 to be exact, which for many would be more easilly remembered as happening just 4 days after Elvis Presley died.
The USA as a country is very different today to say the least.
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