In the 1970s, a couple of pioneering missions were launched. space ships NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have flown away from Earth since their launch in 1977, and with more than 40 years of space travel under their belts, are now the most distant man-made objects.
as you remember Slash Gear, have traveled beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto and now they are exploring the region between stars called interstellar space.
The two spacecraft are the first spacecraft to travel outside of the Sun’s magnetic field, called the heliosphere, but as they get further and further away and age, the amount of energy they have access to is dwindling.
When you look back on the technological advances made in the last few decades, it seems incredible that the Voyager missions are still running, but they are not only still active, they are also collecting scientific data.
How do they still work?
Keep the spaceship running requires extremely careful power managementbut mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) say their goal is keep these intrepid explorers running for as long as possible.
Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, said: “The science data Voyagers are returning becomes more valuable the farther they get from the Sun, so we’re definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments running as long as possible.”.
However, a spaceship cannot run forever, as they have limited amounts of energy to harness. Every year, each ship produces four fewer watts of power from its nuclear power systems, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs)which means the team must be selective about which instruments and systems stay on.
The more instruments are turned on, the faster they will consume energy and the sooner the mission will end. In the case of Voyager 2, it has five science instruments currently in operation, while Voyager 1 has four instruments because one failed shortly after launch.
Team scientists want to keep these instruments on to continue collecting data and have determined that they can run the instruments for a few more years using some backup power.