NASA’s Voyager spacecraft may only have five years left
The twin Voyager probes have about five years before they fall silent, when they'll no longer be able to send word of their adventures back. The Voyagers' journey will continue indefinitely, but we will no longer travel with them. "It's cooling off. The spacecraft is getting colder all the time and the power is dropping," Ed Stone, the mission's project scientist and a physicist at Caltech, said during a news conference held on 31 October in conjunction with the publication of a handful of new scientific papers. "We know that somehow, in another five years or so, we may not have enough power to have any scientific instruments on any longer."
Their success is unprecedented, even by NASA standards; the mission has lasted for two-thirds of the agency's existence. "We're certainly surprised, but also wonderfully excited by the fact they do [still work],"
Stone said. "When the two Voyagers were launched, the Space Age was only 20 years old, so it was hard to know at that time that anything could last over 40 years."
Stone spoke to mark the publication of the first batch of scientific papers comparing the two crossings. The twin spacecrafts' transitions to interstellar space have been similar, but not identical, variations on a theme that humans have no concrete plans to experience again anytime soon. Unless something very dramatic happens in the universe around us, Pluto veteran New Horizons, like the Pioneer spacecraft before it, will fall silent long before it escapes our little bubble, the heliosphere.
What the Voyager mission has made clear is that two crossings are hardly enough to begin understanding this bubble – and that the spacecraft have completely changed what we know about it.