NASA working on ‘Big Bang’ upgrade to keep the Voyagers alive for longer

NASA has revealed it’s working on a plan called “The Big Bang” that it hopes will extend the working lives of the Voyager probes.

A few details about the plan appear in an April 17 NASA announcement which revealed that during a planned roll maneuver on February 27, “Voyager 1’s power levels fell unexpectedly.”

“Mission engineers knew any additional drop in power could trigger the spacecraft’s undervoltage fault protection system, which would shut down components on its own to safeguard the probe, requiring recovery by the flight team – a lengthy process that carries its own risks,” the announcement explains.

To avoid that scenario, the Voyager team decided to shut off the craft’s Low-energy Charged Particles experiment (LECP), because they hope doing so will give Voyager 1 “about a year of breathing room.”

“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the ...