NASA Completes Daring ‘Big Bang’ Fix on the Voyager 2 Probe, Allowing It to Keep Studying Interstellar Space

Scientists swapped three of the probe’s heating devices for ones that use less energy, and they might do the same with Voyager 1. Both spacecraft launched almost 50 years ago

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

August 12, 2026 4:09 p.m.

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NASA’s twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are more than 13 billion miles away from Earth and counting, making them the farthest-flung human-made objects. But they’re also operating way above their paygrade, and with a continuously decreasing power supply. They launched almost 50 years ago, after all.

To keep Voyager 2 chugging along on its journey at the edge of the sun’s domain—and collecting invaluable data—NASA recently made a daring fix dubbed the “big bang.” In July, scientists turned off some of the probe’s devices, namely heaters, and turned on substitutes that require less energy.

“This was a team effort, the culmination of a year of work, with almost every team member contributing,” Kareem Badaruddin, manager of the Voyager Interstellar Mission who is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. “The feeling of realizing that we had extended the life of the spacecraft and science return by two years or more was fulfillment and delight. It had been a difficult task, and our hard work was rewarded.”

The team turned off two heaters and a digital tape recorder that had been kept on for its residual heat. They substituted them with lower-power devices, specifically two different heaters and a propulsion instrument that produces residual heat.

“At this point, almost everything functions as a heater, no matter what it was designed to do,” Badaruddin tells Scientific American’s Meghan Bartels.

This maneuver was completed while ensuring the probe stayed warm enough to function, according to a statement. That’s tough because Voyager 2 is so far that the team didn’t know whether their commands worked until around 40 hours after sending them.

The strategy represents the latest move in the delicate dance of keeping the probes alive for as long as possible.

The Voyagers launched in 1977 with the original aim of investigating the solar system’s outer planets. Having completed that, the probes are now on an interstellar mission investigating the margins of the sun’s sphere of influence.

But they can’t keep it up forever. They’re powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which turn heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. Each probe’s plutonium supply is finite, losing around four watts of power per year.

“After almost a half-century since launch, the spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems,” NASA explains in the statement.

The Voyagers launched with ten instruments per spacecraft. Some have been shut down because they weren’t working properly, while others have been turned off to save energy. In April, for example, the team powered down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, which measured ions, electrons and cosmic rays from the solar system and galaxy. Now, it has only two operating instruments.

Voyager 2 still has three. The big bang intervention prevented NASA from having to shut down one of them before the end of the year, per the statement.

Next, the team aims to apply the same fix to Voyager 1, though with any set of siblings, success on Voyager 2 doesn’t mean the other will react the same way.

“Although the spacecraft were built to the same design, we have observed differences between them,” Badaruddin tells CNN.

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.