NASA Just Fixed a Spacecraft 13 Billion Miles Away
NASA has sent a software update to Voyager 2, a spacecraft about 13 billion miles from Earth, to keep its remaining science instruments running for an extra year. Without the update, the agency would have had to shut down one more instrument later in 2026. Engadget
Voyager 2 launched in 1977, about two weeks before its twin, Voyager 1, carrying 10 scientific instruments. Only three of those instruments are still working today. The spacecraft reached Jupiter in 1979 and spent the following decade visiting every large planet in the outer solar system. In 2018, Voyager 2 crossed into interstellar space, the region beyond the bubble of particles the Sun creates around itself and its planets. Since then, it has been sending back data about the conditions in that distant region.
The core problem is power. Voyager 2 runs on a generator that turns heat from decaying radioactive plutonium into electricity. As the plutonium slowly runs out, the spacecraft loses about 4 watts of power each year. NASA has dealt with this decline for years by turning instruments off one at a time. The Voyager 2 Low-Energy Charged Particles instrument was powered off on March 24, 2025, to save power. In April 2026, NASA shut off the matching instrument on Voyager 1 for the same reason. A cosmic ray instrument on one of the two probes is also scheduled to be shut off in 2026. JPL NASA Science
The update NASA sent, called Operation Big Bang, did more than just turn off another instrument. Engineers simultaneously shut down some devices and replaced them with lower-power alternatives, reorganizing how the spacecraft uses both power and heat. The team had to make sure Voyager 2 would stay warm enough after the changes, because some of the turned-off equipment had been helping keep the spacecraft at a safe temperature. The result: all three remaining instruments can keep collecting data through next year. JPL
By August 2026, NASA engineers had determined that Voyager 2 had enough power to keep running three science instruments longer than they previously thought. That finding is what made the Big Bang operation possible. JPL
The scale of what NASA pulled off is worth stepping back to appreciate. A software patch written at a NASA facility is converted into radio signals, sent through a global network of large antennas, and received by a spacecraft moving at 9.6 miles per second in interstellar space. A radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes about a day and a half to make the round trip. If the update fails or leaves the probe in a bad state, there is no one to physically fix it, no repair crew, and no restart button. Any backup plan has to be built into the instructions themselves.
This is not the first time NASA has gotten creative with Voyager's power. In 2023, the agency found a way to share power differently between systems, allowing each Voyager to keep running four instruments instead of the expected three. Each fix like this buys months to a few years of extra time, against a steady decline in available power that will eventually reach zero. JPL
Voyager 2's nonessential instruments were permanently turned off 21 years after launch, leaving seven. That number has since fallen to three. Each time an instrument is shut off, humanity loses a type of measurement it cannot get anywhere else. The data these last three instruments collect on plasma, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields cannot be gathered by any telescope on Earth or in orbit. No new mission is being built to send similar instruments into interstellar space. When the last instrument goes dark, that data stream ends for good.
In this author's view, the Big Bang operation is a remarkable act of remote engineering. Updating a computer across 13 billion miles, with no way to physically inspect or repair the hardware, takes extraordinary care, especially on a spacecraft whose computers were designed before the IBM PC existed. The original engineers who built Voyager have largely retired, and the fact that today's team can still understand and safely modify its systems is a testament to how NASA preserves knowledge across generations.
The spacecraft will not last forever. The plutonium that powers it is running out, and no software fix can stop that. But each extension means more scientific data from a place humanity may not reach again for decades. For a mission originally designed to last five years, still sending back data from interstellar space 49 years later is an outcome no one planned or expected.
