It is not uncommon for NASA missions to last well beyond their expected lifespan and be granted extensions after achieving their primary objectives. Instead of three months, the Opportunity Mars rover stayed active for nearly 15 years. Operated by NASA in partnership with the European Space Agency, the Saturn-focused Cassini orbiter has survived for 20 years instead of four. But Voyager definitely gets the cosmic cake. If Dodd’s team’s energy conservation plan works out, the two could reach her unprecedented 50th, with a “stretch goal” set for him to reach 200 AU around 2035.
But this requires sacrificing one scientific instrument at a time.
Five instruments continue to hum on Voyager 2: a magnetometer, a plasma wave surveyor, a plasma science experiment, a cosmic ray detector, and a low-energy charged particle detector. The first two take only about 2W to run, and their electronics are in the body of the probe, so they’re probably the last to shut down. Others are housed in frigid ship booms and use 3-5 watts each, so turning each off will give you an extra year of life.
maybe interstellar space It looks completely empty, but it’s not. There are still solar particles and magnetic phenomena to study. “The farther you go from the sun, the more interesting it gets, because you never know what you might find,” says JPL Voyager project scientist Linda Spilker. Outside, they expected the Sun’s magnetic field to slowly rotate in the direction of the interstellar medium, and that Voyager could track it, but Spilker says that such a rotation has not yet been seen. It suggests that the model needs to be updated.
The spacecraft also surveyed the interstellar medium and used those instruments to detect radiation from a dazzling gamma-ray burst in another galaxy last October.
Missions based on the new spacecraft will take advantage of Voyager’s ongoing solar science. As early as 2025, NASA plans to launch the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to survey the heliosphere. Voyager is already well outside the heliosphere, so measurements from the farther-away rover can be compared to those from the newer rover much closer. “It’s really cool to see Voyager in IMAP. With the image processing done by IMAP, Voyager will also be making valuable measurements locally,” said Princeton Physics, who leads the IMAP collaboration. Scholar David McComas says. He likens it to a doctor doing a CAT scan of her in a person’s brain to get the big picture and a biopsy to get more information.
Voyager isn’t finished yet, but it already has an impressive legacy. This includes NASA’s New Horizons probe, which glimpsed Pluto in 2015. Now her 55 AU from Earth, the spacecraft is probing the edge of the heliosphere with newer and better sensors than Voyager is equipped with, and is already taking images of objects. Like Pluto’s moons and the Kuiper belt objects called Arrokos, they were not yet discovered when Voyager was launched. says Alan Stern, principal investigator at the Southwest Institute and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Institute. New Horizons is the only other distant man-made rover still operational and could last into 2050, Stern says.
Inspired by the huge success of Voyager, engineers are already designing next-generation spacecraft concepts. For example, powered by lasers and lightsails, it could dive into distant interstellar environments faster than the rovers of the 1970s. What advice should they glean from Voyager’s long and healthy life? First, according to Dodd, even robust equipment will eventually fail, so have enough fuel and redundant systems. It’s convenient to have. And, she says, it’s important to pass on knowledge in case the craft outlives the designer’s generation.
