NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are some of the most incredible pieces of equipment ever made.

They were first launched back in 1977 and have been traveling through space ever since.

The craft completed all of their planned experiments decades ago, and have since been flying away from Earth, breaking records every moment that they continue.

Voyager 1 is now around 15 billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 2 is 13 billion miles away. This is well outside the established boundaries of our solar system, and pushing deeper into interstellar space at every moment.

The systems on board were never designed to last this long, but they continue to gather data from their surrounding environment and send it back to Earth. As systems break, or the power on the crafts gets too low, the team here on Earth has to shut down various things to try to keep it operational as long as possible.

Recently, Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem experiment had to be shut down and Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument is also going offline.

This is according to a statement from NASA.

Both Voyagers are powered using radioactively decaying plutonium-238 isotopes. They are now losing about four watts of power each year, so the end is in sight for these amazing crafts.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory continues to operate the Voyager craft, making the difficult decisions on when to take things offline. Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd recently put out a statement where she said:

“The Voyagers have been deep space rock stars since launch, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible. But electrical power is running low. If we don’t turn off an instrument on each Voyager now, they would probably have only a few more months of power before we would need to declare end of mission.”

This is not the first time the team has had to make this type of difficult decision. They have taken multiple other systems offline over the years. These types of decisions have allowed the spacecraft to operate far longer than the original team could have possibly hoped for.

For example, NASA said that the motor that one of the motors that operates on the Voyager spacecraft was originally tested to work for 500,000 steps. According to the latest data, it has completed more than 8.5 million steps, which is remarkable.

Patrick Koehn is a scientist working on the Voyager program and in the NASA post said:

“The Voyager spacecraft have far surpassed their original mission to study the outer planets. Every bit of additional data we have gathered since then is not only valuable bonus science for heliophysics, but also a testament to the exemplary engineering that has gone into the Voyagers — starting nearly 50 years ago and continuing to this day.”

While NASA plans to do everything possible to keep these amazing spacecraft online as long as possible, they do know that each day could be its last. Once the final systems go offline, the Voyager spacecraft will continue to fly away into the depths of space forever (or at least until they run into something, or another civilization finds them!).

While space programs have done some amazing things since the launch of Voyager, it is hard to argue that anything has been more successful than the Voyager mission.

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