NASA specialists have successfully extended the life of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 veteran probes by turning off the heating system of the cosmic ray sensors, and also "revitalizing" some of the engines that were last used 30 years ago. This will help a couple of the oldest spacecraft live even longer than scientists expect.
“Both devices are now exploring those corners of space that we have never visited or seen, and therefore every extra day of their work will bring us new discoveries. Voyagers continue to amaze us by uncovering the secrets of deep space, said Ed Stone, the permanent leader and creator of the Voyager project.
The Voyager mission, represented by the twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, was launched into space in September 1977, and today these vehicles are the farthest from Earth and the longest-lived spacecraft. Now, as observations from the Voyager 2 sensors show, they have completely left the heliosphere - a "bubble" from the plasma of the solar wind that surrounds our world, and have gone beyond the "cradle of humanity".
In other words, since 2012, when Voyager 1 reached the so-called heliopause, the boundary between the solar system and the interstellar medium, a pair of NASA probes have been moving through a space completely unknown to science, whose properties have been a mystery to astronomers for several decades.
For this reason, scientists have no ideas and expectations about what the probes will collide with as they move through space to other stars. Experts expect the Voyagers to work until at least 2020 and collect information on the properties of the interstellar medium and the boundary between the heliosphere and open space. The main problem for both devices is that their main source of heat and electricity, radioisotope generators, are gradually losing their power.
This is due to the fact that the plutonium-238 contained in them has a rather short half-life, 87 years. Thanks to this, the radioactive "heart" of the probes now produces about 40% less heat than 42 years ago, which is why the engineers of the mission and its scientific team had to turn off some of the instruments. Some of them went down on their own, but others will have to be sacrificed. Turning off the heater and turning on the old shunting engines significantly extended the life of the devices, but in the coming years, Stone and his team suggest they will have to turn off the heating of other scientific instruments.
Scientists have already performed a similar operation in the past with the Voyager 1 ultraviolet detector - it worked for several years after the transition to the "cold" mode. For this reason, they hope that the rest of Voyager 2's tools will survive this procedure, allowing him to set new records for longevity.