
NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory powered down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument to conserve the probe’s dwindling electrical power on April 17, preserving energy for essential systems and communications as its radioisotope power source declines. That shutdown is a deliberate effort to keep the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft operating as long as possible, and it highlights the same end-of-life challenges NASA faced when MAVEN was recently declared dead after months of radio silence.
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