3 hours Ago By Jak Connor
The time has finally come to switch off one of the instruments aboard one of the greatest ongoing scientific achievements of the human race. NASA officially launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1977, and since then, it has been sending valuable scientific data back to Earth from interstellar space or beyond our solar system. NASA has been receiving Voyager 2's scientific data for 47 years, which makes the spacecraft the oldest active space probe.
So far, Voyager 2 has traveled 12.8 billion miles away from Earth, and throughout its journey, it used several scientific instruments to measure the giant planets in the 1980s. After completing that mission NASA switched off those instruments as they weren't useful in Voyager 2's new mission which was and still is to measure interstellar space.
Voyager 2 is powered by plutonium, and it decays every year. NASA explained that Voyager 2's power source loses about 4 watts of power each year and that NASA teams have been working to postpone the time when more instruments aboard Voyager 2 would need to be shut down to conserve power for the overall mission. NASA has decided to shut down the plasma science instrument, which is designed to measure " the amount of plasma (electrically charged atoms) and the direction it is flowing ".
NASA's Deep Space Network sent the instruction to shut down the instrument, which took 19 hours to reach the space probe..
