Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.

Voyager 1 is still transmitting from beyond the heliosphere on 22 watts — less power than the bulb in your hallway — and the engineers who built it in the 1970s never expected we'd still be listening half a century later.

On 17 April 2026, mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California sent commands to switch off the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment aboard Voyager 1. The instrument had been operating, almost without interruption, since the spacecraft left Cape Canaveral in September 1977. The shutdown was not a fault. It was the latest in a careful sequence of sacrifices. Voyager 1’s three radioisotope thermoelectric generators lose ab…