NASA Turns Off Instrument on Spacecraft Due to Shrinking Power Supply

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) announced this week that it was turning off an instrument on one of its spacecraft in an effort to conserve power.
On Tuesday, NASA said it shut down Voyager 2’s plasma science instrument—responsible for tracking the flow of charged particles—in late September. The move is aimed at prolonging the spacecraft’s mission with the agency hoping to keep it operational into the 2030s.
NASA powered down a set of instruments on both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, after the spacecraft completed their exploration of the gas giants in the 1980s. Currently traveling through interstellar space—the region between stars—Voyager 1’s plasma instrument had ceased functioning years earlier and was officially shut off in 2007.
“Traveling more than 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft continues to use four science instruments to study the region outside our heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. The probe has enough power to continue exploring this region with at least one operational science instrument into the 2030s,” NASA said in a press release this week.
“The plasma science instrument measures the amount of plasma (electrically charged atoms) and the direction it is flowing, ” the press release added. “It has collected limited data in recent years due to its orientation relative to the direction that plasma is flowing in interstellar space.”
Voyager 2, launched in 1977, remains the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune. It is now more than 12 billion miles from Earth. Its twin, Voyager 1, is even farther out, traveling over 15 billion miles away.
According to NASA, engineers have sought to avoid shutting power down on instruments aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts for several years, “because the science data collected by the twin Voyager probes is unique.”
“No other human-made spacecraft has operated in interstellar space, the region outside the heliosphere,” NASA said.
NASA said that the instruments were powered down on September 26 and it took 19 hours for signals to reach Voyager 2 from Earth.
“Mission engineers always carefully monitor changes being made to the 47-year-old spacecraft’s operations to ensure they don’t generate any unwanted secondary effects. The team has confirmed that the switch-off command was executed without incident and the probe is operating normally,” NASA said. “The Voyager team continues to monitor the health of the spacecraft and its available resources to make engineering decisions that maximize the mission’s science output.”
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.