NASA Turns Off Voyager 2's Solar Wind Detector to Save Power

Imagine a spacecraft traveling so far from Earth that it takes nearly two days for a message to reach it. That's the situation with NASA's Voyager 2, which is currently over 13 billion miles away. Recently, mission engineers had to make a tough decision: they shut off one of its science instruments to conserve power. The instrument in question? A device that studies solar winds, those streams of charged particles from the sun. Why turn it off now? As Voyager 2 gets older (it's been exploring since 1977!), its power supply is running low. It uses plutonium to generate electricity, but that's slowly running out. So, NASA sent a command using their Deep Space Network to switch off the solar wind detector.

But why not keep it on? Well, Voyager 2 isn't in an ideal position to collect much data anymore. It's already left our sun's magnetic bubble (the heliosphere) and is now in interstellar space. So, turning off this instrument won't stop the spacecraft from doing its job – it just means it won't be studying solar winds as intensely. NASA expects Voyager 2 to keep working until at least the 2030s, even with some instruments turned off. They've been doing this for years, slowly shutting down different parts of both Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, to make their power last as long as possible.

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