NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
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NASA extended Voyager 2's life by a year by repurposing power from a safety system.
NASA engineers diverted power from a voltage regulator on Voyager 2, originally reserved for a fault-protection system, to keep one of its five remaining science instruments running for another year. The probe, launched in 1977 and now 13 billion miles away, would have had to shut down the instrument later in 2026 without the change. The fix buys time until the spacecraft's decaying plutonium power source forces another shutdown.
What commenters are saying
Commenters celebrated the engineering feat but noted the team is tiny, with key knowledge held by a few veteran engineers. One commenter recalled a JPL developer who was apparently the last person who could encode Voyager command sequences. Others debated whether the probes still do meaningful science or are mostly a public-relations effort. A technical discussion arose about the risks of sending commands to 50-year-old hardware, including undocumented quirks and the impossibility of a second try if an AI-generated command bricks the spacecraft.