Voyager’s interstellar mission shows how 1970s spacecraft are still teaching NASA engineers new lessons

Two Voyager spacecraft, built in the 1970s and launched before personal computers became ordinary household objects, are still returning science data from interstellar space in 2026. On April 17, NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a command to Voyager 1 to shut down one of its science instruments, not because the mission had failed, but because the spacecraft needed the power elsewhere.

That tension, between a mission that has outlasted almost every expectation and a power budget now measured in single watts...