After four and a half decades in operation, the lives of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 seem to be coming to an end. In a new piece that made its way to Scientific American this week, it was revealed that NASA has a tendency to discontinue the systems currently on board the two spacecraft. If all goes according to plan, turning off selected instruments will retain enough power to allow the probes to continue transmitting data until 2030 or so. Without any changes in the instruments, the ship is expected to go offline in 2025.
“We are 44 and a half years old,” physicist Ralph McNaught told the magazine. “So we made a 10 times bigger guarantee for the damn things.”
Voyager’s ships were assembled for the first time to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, with scientists hoping to capture flashes of Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus. Both the spacecraft launched in the summer of 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, exceeded the researcher’s boldest expectations.
The probes gave scientists a first look at the moons of these distant planets, with Voyager 2 becoming the first spacecraft to fly past Uranus and Neptune. To date, the ship is the only probe that can make such a voyage.
“Four years – that was the main mission,” added Susan Dodd, project manager with the launch of Voyager. “But if an engineer had the choice to install a part that is 10 percent more expensive, but not something that is needed for a four-year mission, they just keep doing it. And they don’t have to tell management.
45 years after launch, both ships are in perfect working order. In 2012, Voyager 1 even became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, part of space outside our immediate solar system. Voyager 2 reached interstellar space six years later, still transmitting data to scientists back to Earth.
Most famously, however, the Voyager project also includes two records embedded with data if extraterrestrial life manages to reach the probes. These recordings include images of various wild animals on Earth, including various members of the human race. The recordings also include a recording of Bach’s Concerto № 2 and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”. The recordings also carry a message from then-President Jimmy Carter.
“We hope that one day, after solving the problems we face, we will join a community of galactic civilizations,” Carter said in the recording. “This record represents our hope and our determination and our good will in a vast and great universe.
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