NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft update: How the 49-year-old probe is still alive in deep space

NASA's Voyager 1 was launched almost 49 years ago and is still actively travelling through deep space, currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth. Voyager 1 was created by humans and is the furthest any human-made object has ever travelled. However, Voyager 1is facing a power-related emergency due to its radioisotope thermoelectric generators losing approximately four watts of power every year. Without power, Voyager 1 will enter fault-protection mode automatically and will no longer be operational to support future scientific observations. To avoid this situation, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineers have begun the process of turning off non-essential systems in a way that will allow JPL to continue being able to communicate with and receive scientific data from the edges of our solar system throughout the 2030s. This mission expansion underscores humanity's enduring quest for knowledge, ensuring this pioneering spacecraft continues its historic journey into interstellar space exploration.As part of NASA’s continuing effort to support the Voyager 1 mission, the agency has made another decision to actively deactivate a major science instrument: the Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) experiment has been turned off intentionally on April 17th, 2026, as noted in NASA Science. The LECP provided almost continuous measurements of ions, electrons and cosmic rays from beyond the heliosphere since the spacecraft was launched in 1977.The decision to deactivate the LECP was made according to a pre-set hierarchy of priority for continuing to keep the most important systems functioning as long as possible. Disabling the LECP will help make it easier for engineers to improve the power output of the spacecraft and avoid future failures to the spacecraft's systems during its long flight through the interstellar medium.According to NASA, they are currently planning an ambitious plan called ‘the Big Bang’ to further extend the operational life of the Voyager spacecraft. The plan involves the coordinated reconfiguration of several onboard components by reconfiguration of existing onboard components.The goal of this plan is to make the best use of the remaining power available while keeping the spacecraft warm enough to avoid fuel line freeze-up. NASA plans to test this new procedure on Voyager 2 in May and June 2026 and, if successful, will apply the same solution to Voyager 1 no earlier than July with a very small possibility of reactivating previously closed instruments.Spacecraft operating at extreme distance must face distinct logistic challenges when operating an operationally autonomous spacecraft such as Voyager 1, which is 23 light hours from Earth; therefore, every command issued from Ground Control involves nearly a full day before it arrives at the probe, and then nearly a full day after the probe receives the command before it can confirm receipt of that command. This capacity (or, rather, loss of capacity) results in mission managers being required to manage a much different way than that which is typical for successful crewed spacecraft by exercising a level of caution and forethought, as real-time troubleshooting cannot be accomplished at all.Currently, Voyager 1 maintains contact with Earth via the final two operational science instruments onboard-the plasma wave subsystems and the magnetometer - allowing for the continued transmission of new and revolutionary scientific data originating from regions of space never previously travelled to by a human-designed spacecraft.