{"id":1139324,"date":"2026-08-09T08:24:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1139324\/"},"modified":"2026-08-09T08:24:26","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:24:26","slug":"upcoming-hack-to-keep-nasas-voyager-1-alive-exploits-a-quirk-in-its-1970s-hardware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1139324\/","title":{"rendered":"Upcoming Hack to Keep NASA’s Voyager 1 Alive Exploits a Quirk in Its 1970s Hardware"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blitzing through interstellar space at over 35,000 miles per hour (56,000 kilometers per hour), NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 probe is now over 15 billion miles (or about 24 billion km) away<\/a> from Earth. And the U.S. space agency\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab just north of Los Angeles is working hard to make sure it keeps going for just a bit longer.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Voyager mission engineers at JPL announced that they have successfully executed a critical power-saving hack on the spacecraft\u2019s sister probe, Voyager 2. They\u2019re calling<\/a> it the \u201cbig bang,\u201d a delicate toggling on and off of Voyager 2\u2019s key components, in pairs of three, across a coordinated sequence\u2014conserving energy without disastrously freezing the probe\u2019s fuel line or its critical hardware out in the inhospitable cold of deep space. In essence, the scheme makes a virtue of the fact that the Voyagers, both launched in the late summer of 1977, are relics (respectfully) of midcentury electronics: Thanks to good old-fashioned waste heat, practically every instrument onboard these probes can be canily used to help to keep the craft warm.<\/p>\n

Voyager 2 was closer to Earth and had more power to test this stunt on. But, now, according to NASA\u2019s Voyager mission manager Kareem Badaruddin, JPL hopes to repeat this hat trick again on the farther out Voyager 1.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the most important thing we\u2019ve done on the Voyager spacecraft in decades,\u201d Badaruddin told<\/a> Scientific American on Friday. \u201cI don\u2019t want to jinx it, but this \u2018big bang\u2019 test has gone remarkably smoothly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hot pursuit <\/p>\n

Both Voyagers run on modest nuclear power plants, thermoelectric generators that convert<\/a>\u00a0heat produced by the natural radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. But, as that plutonium isotope decays toward its 88-year half-life<\/a>, less and less heat is being emitted, losing each Voyager craft about 4 watts of power per year.<\/p>\n

JPL\u2019s \u201cbig bang\u201d maneuver switches off two of its heaters and one old-school, eight-track tape recorder<\/a> used by Voyager\u2019s digital Data Tape Recorder (DTR) system while carefully switching on two other heating units and one of the craft\u2019s onboard propulsion systems. The move saves the probe almost 10 watts per year without losing any essential hardware to the cold.<\/p>\n

\"VoyagerNASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, tested the Voyager probes in this 25-foot space simulator chamber in 1976. Now, that hardware is in interstellar space. Credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech <\/p>\n

Both Voyager probes launched with 10 instruments apiece, with plenty being natural candidates for powering down much earlier in their lifecycle given that these devices had already served their purpose<\/a> during the crafts\u2019 \u201cGrand Tour\u201d of the planets in our solar system.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s Voyager team hopes that its energy savings from the \u201cbig bang\u201d might help run one additional instrument on Voyager 1, the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment (LECP), which helps measure the particle density of interstellar space. LECP had to be powered down on Voyager 1 this spring to prevent the probe\u2019s own system reset from taking over<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments\u2014one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields,\u201d as Badaruddin, who is also a systems engineer at JPL, noted<\/a> in a NASA announcement this past April. \u201cThey are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored.\u201d<\/p>\n

One light-day away from home <\/p>\n

If it makes it to this November, Voyager 1 will hit a historic milestone, passing one light-day\u2019s distance from Earth, which you\u2019re welcome to think about as either merely a small fraction of one light-year or as a staggering 173 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Past this point, it will take messages over 24 hours to reach Voyager 1, so long as it manages to stay online.<\/p>\n

In 2022, Suzanne Dodd, a project manager for Voyager at JPL, told a NASA livestream<\/a> audience that she thought Voyager 1 would \u201cdefinitely\u201d make it to its 50th anniversary next year on September 5, 2027.<\/p>\n

If NASA gets \u201creally lucky,\u201d as Dodd told<\/a> Space.com that same year, Voyager 1 \u201cmight be able to go out to the 2030s.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Blitzing through interstellar space at over 35,000 miles per hour (56,000 kilometers per hour), NASA\u2019s Voyager 1 probe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1139325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8],"tags":[117479,874,70,7305,16,15,48872],"class_list":["post-1139324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-interstellar-probes","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-space-exploration","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-voyager-1"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117064597222645998","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1139324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1139325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1139324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1139324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1139324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}