this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating (science.nasa.gov)
submitted 23 hours ago by vogi@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.

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[–] abigscaryhobo@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

The problem is that you're not just sending parts out there. You have to:

  • get the upgrade rocket going fast enough to actually catch up with something going very fast with a 20 year head start
  • slow down once you get to it.
  • make the upgrades while floating in space on a piece of hardware that was designed not to be upgraded and built on earth (hope you don't need gravity for disassembly) that you control on a 30 minute delay.

At that point we could just launch a whole new satellite with better hardware, going faster, and covering a completely different area of space. Which is what we have done. But we can still make use of the system we have out there. It's still the furthest out, so it's still worth using for as long as we can

[–] nexguy@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

We haven't sent anything away from the sun faster than Voyager 1. It's still the fastest.

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't a major challenge of trying to surpass Voyager 1 that it had extremely good conditions for slingshotting off a lot of planets?

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 hours ago

Yes, although we have ion thrusters now, so theoretically we could use something like that to get something going very fast over a long time. A little acceleration constantly over a long time goes a long way.