NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft have been through a lot: nearly 50 years of space travel and an astonishing 15 billion miles.
The two probes, launched less than a month apart in the summer of 1977, have survived everything from dwindling power supplies and grimy thrusters to near-fatal software glitches and several scientific instruments going dark.
Heck, they weren’t even designed to go this far, since they were only originally intended to study our star system’s outer planets.
But instead of allowing the two spacecraft to rest in peace — a well-deserved end to an almost half-a-century-long journey — NASA is still trying every trick in the book to keep the aging probes alive.
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“These two spacecraft are still operating, still returning uniquely valuable science data, and every extra day we get data back is a blessing,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, told Ars Technica.
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