NASA engineers have turned off one of Voyager 2’s science instruments due to dwindling power supplies on the spacecraft as it explores interstellar space.
Voyager 2 launched into space on Aug. 20, 1977 and left the solar system on Nov. 5, 2018. It is currently 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and is using four science instruments to study space beyond the heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of influence around the solar system. NASA thinks that Voyager 2 has enough power to keep running one science instrument into the 2030s, but doing that requires selecting which of its other instruments need to be turned off.
Mission specialists have tried to delay the instrument shutdown until now because Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 are the only two active probes humanity has in interstellar space, making any data they gather unique. Thus far, six of the spacecraft’s initial 10 instruments have been deactivated. Now, losing the seventh has become unavoidable, and the spacecraft’s plasma science instrument drew the short straw. On Sept. 26, engineers gave the command to turn off the instrument.
The plasma science instrument consists of four
