Voyager 1 turns off LECP experiment
- NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shut down Voyager 1’s Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment on April 17 to conserve power on the aging interstellar probe. - The instrument had run for nearly 49 years, and Voyager 1 is now closing in on one light-day from Earth, NASA said. - The shutdown follows earlier power cuts as NASA tries to keep both Voyagers operating into the 2030s. (jpl.nasa.gov)
Voyager 1 switched off one of its last working science instruments on April 17 as NASA tries to keep the spacecraft operating on dwindling power. (jpl.nasa.gov) The instrument was the Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP, which measures ions, electrons, and cosmic rays in the space beyond the Sun’s influence. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent the shutdown command from Southern California. (jpl.nasa.gov) Voyager 1 launched in 1977, entered interstellar space in 2012, and the LECP had operated almost continuously for nearly 49 years before this shutdown. NASA said the instrument helped map pressure fronts and particle-density changes in the interstellar medium. (jpl.nasa.gov) Voyager runs on electricity generated from the heat of decaying plutonium, and each spacecraft loses about 4 watts of power every year. NASA said that without more shutdowns, the probes would have had only a few more months before engineers faced an end-of-mission decision. (nasa.gov) The mission team has been planning these cuts in sequence rather than making them ad hoc. NASA said seven of the 10 identical instrument sets carried by each spacecraft have now been shut off. (jpl.nasa.gov) The remaining active instruments on Voyager 1 are the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem, while its cosmic ray subsystem was turned off on February 25, 2025. Voyager 2 still has its magnetometer and plasma wave subsystem on, but its LECP was shut down on March 24, 2025. (science.nasa.gov) (nasa.gov) NASA’s live mission page says Voyager 1 is closing in on one light-day from Earth later in 2026, a distance that pushes round-trip command times to roughly two days. In May 2025, engineers also revived long-dormant backup thrusters to protect the probe’s ability to keep its antenna pointed at Earth. (science.nasa.gov) (jpl.nasa.gov) NASA’s current plan is to keep shaving power loads so the twin spacecraft can continue returning data from interstellar space into the 2030s. For now, Voyager 1 is still sending home measurements from the edge between the solar system and the galaxy beyond it. (nasa.gov) (science.nasa.gov)
