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NASA has begun shutting down the systems of the Voyager spacecraft, signaling the start of the final 50-year journey.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 and traveled through interstellar space to the edge of the solar system, giving humanity its closest view of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
However, now NASA has to start limiting Voyagers processes in order to keep them running until 2030.
It’s been more than 44 years, says Ralph McNutt, a physicist in Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, for Scientific American.
The first Voyager spacecraft has four functional instruments left, while the Voyager 2 has five, in 2019, engineers had to turn off the heater for the cosmic ray detector, a key part of the detection device when the Voyager 2 came out of the heliosphere.
The final instruments that NASA will deactivate are likely to be the plasma magnetometer and scientific instrument, which are found in the body of the spacecraft.
Both ships remain so far from Earth that it takes a radio signal almost 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and a little over 18 for Voyager 2 even when traveling at the speed of light. However, the usefulness of the ship has far exceeded the expectations of astronomers.
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