NASA's 50-year-old Voyager 2 gets a power hack to stay alive extra year

The deep-space probe relies on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that runs on decaying plutonium, losing roughly four watts of electrical output every single year. After nearly five decades in flight, available energy has dropped to critical levels, forcing mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to progressively power down onboard hardware.

In 2024, engineers had to shut off two scientific instruments on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 out of the original ten. Without drastic intervention, NASA would have been forced to kill another vital sensor on Voyager 2 before the end of 2026, leaving the craft largely blind to its interstellar surroundings.

To prevent this, the team executed a risky power-swapping maneuver dubbed Operation Big Bang, simultaneously turning off high-draw components and rerouting power to lower-voltage alternatives while maintaining safe internal temperatures. The maneuver successfully reclaimed enough electricity to keep the probe's remaining three scientific instruments operational for at least one additional year, with plans to attempt the exact same wizardry on Voyager 1 in the coming months.

It remains deeply poetic that humanity's greatest achievement in deep space relies on remote IT support for a computer with less memory than a digital car key. Some legacy code simply refuses to die, regardless of how far into the void it drifts.