Anonymousabout 2 hours ago
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shut down Voyager 1's Low-Energy Charged Particle instrument on April 17, 2026, leaving the 48-year-old spacecraft with just two functioning science instruments as its nuclear power source continues its irreversible decline. The move buys roughly one year of additional operating time, but raises pressing questions about the growing observational gap in interstellar space — a region only the Voyager probes can currently study — and whether a proposed successor mission, the Interstellar Probe, can launch before that window closes entirely.