Skip to main content

The long goodbye of NASA’s forty-year-old Voyager probes

Update Jun 23: A NASA spokesperson has clarified that the powering down of some of the Voyagers’ systems is part of an ongoing process of power management which has ramped up in the past three years and is not a recent change. A committee will make a decision about further management of the probes’ power budget this August. The article has been updated accordingly.

The Voyager probes, the most distant human-made objects in the universe, are entering their twilight years. The two probes built by NASA were launched in the 1970s, and their decades-old hardware is still operating — much to everyone’s astonishment — but their power levels are falling at a rate of four watts per year. Over the last three years NASA has turned off the heaters of the probes’ remaining five science instruments, but impressively enough the instruments have continued to operate even in conditions much colder that that which they were tested for.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, shown in this illustration, has been exploring our solar system since 1977, along with its twin, Voyager 2.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, shown in this illustration, has been exploring our solar system since 1977, along with its twin, Voyager 2. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The fact both probes are both still operating at all is incredible, given that they were originally designed for a four-year mission. “We’re at 44 and a half years,” Ralph McNutt, a researcher who has worked with the Voyager probes, said to Scientific American in a profile about the mission. “So we’ve done 10 times the warranty on the darn things.”

Recommended Videos

The Voyager program was able to take advantage of a moment of cosmic coordination, when Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all lined up in such a way that the probes could visit each of these planets on their one-way journey away from Earth. The probes snapped images of Jupiter’s clouds, discovered new phenomena like volcanic activity on Jupiter’s moon Io, and investigated Saturn’s rings.

Pale Blue Dot Revisited
An updated 30th-anniversary version of the Pale Blue Dot photo taken by Voyager 1. NASA

But perhaps the probes’ most celebrated contribution to science was an image that recorded where they had come from: The famous Pale Blue Dot photo showing the Earth as a tiny dot against the blackness of space, taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 when it was 3.7 billion miles from the sun, beyond the orbit of Neptune. The photo has reminded scientists and members of the public of the vastness of space and the fragile nature of Earth ever since.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

In 2013 and 2018, Voyagers 1 and 2 respectively passed a boundary called the heliopause and entered interstellar space. The heliopause is the edge of the sun’s solar wind, and traveling beyond it leaves the probes on the farthest edges of the solar system. The probes are still working and being used to study the interstellar gas they are floating through.

However, as you’d expect, the probes’ 40-year-old hardware has faced some issues. Voyager 2 suffered a power glitch in 2020, and just recently Voyager 1 experienced a strange error from its altitude control system. But they are both still operating and collecting and transmitting data, far outliving even the most optimistic predictions of their lifespans.

With careful power management, they may be able to continue working in some capacity until 2030 — after which we’ll have to say goodbye to these two pioneering explorers, sailing off alone into the dark.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Scientists discover a baby exoplanet ‘just’ 3 million years old
An artist's depiction of the system showing the host star, transiting planet, misaligned transition disk, and wide binary companion (in the background).

It's rare that 3 million years old would be considered young, but that's the case for a recently discovered exoplanet. The study of planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, has exploded in the last decade with more than 5,000 confirmed discoveries to date. But most of those are older, fully mature planets comparable in age to the Earth, which is around 4.5 billion years old.

Recently, though, astronomers using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found a planetary baby, which is the youngest transiting planet discovered so far. It is called transiting because it was spotted when it passed in front of its host star, in an event called a transit, which astronomers can spot by looking for dips in brightness from the star.

Read more
Relive NASA’s debut launch of its mighty SLS rocket on second anniversary
NASA's SLS rocket launching at the start of the Artemis I mission.

NASA’s Artemis I Moon Mission: Launch to Splashdown Highlights

Two years ago, on November 16, NASA performed the maiden launch of its Space Launch System (SLS) mega moon rocket that carried an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to orbit in a mission and marked the official start of the U.S. space agency’s ambitious Artemis program.

Read more
How the 47-year-old Voyager spacecraft are still exploring space
This archival photo shows engineers working on NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft on March 23, 1977.

The Voyager 1 and 2 probes have been on a remarkable journey. Since their launch in 1977, they have traveled through the solar system, past several of the outer planets, and headed out beyond the borders of the solar system and into interstellar space. They are the most distant man-made objects in the universe, and they are still going -- even 47 years after they first left Earth.

Keeping the old technology running for this long hasn't been easy, though. Various instruments have had to be turned off in order to save power, and the probes have had their share of computer glitches to deal with. But they continue to collect science data to this day, revealing information about the composition of space beyond the sun's influence and viewing events far beyond our planet.

Read more