Voyager 1 Restores 4 Science Instruments After June 2024 Memory Fix

Q: Could a high-risk power swap in 2026 revive dormant instruments on the Voyager spacecraft?

Yes — but only as a possibility, not a likely or guaranteed recovery. NASA engineers have been preparing a 2026 power-saving maneuver informally called the “Big Bang,” aimed at freeing about 10 watts on the aging Voyager spacecraft. The plan is to test it on Voyager 2 in May-June 2026 and, if it works, try it on Voyager 1 no earlier than July 2026. The swap is considered risky because the probes are nearly 50 years old, operating on shrinking RTG power, and any command takes roughly a day to arrive. If the maneuver succeeds, it could do more than simply extend mission life. It may create enough electrical margin to restore Voyager 1’s Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment, which NASA shut down in April 2026 after an unexpected power drop. Engineers deliberately left the instrument’s small stepper motor running, using about 0.5 watts, specifically to preserve the option of restarting it later. That said, the effort is fundamentally a survival measure. Voyager 1 now has only two active science instruments, and Voyager 2 has also lost instruments in recent years as power declines by roughly 4 watts annually. NASA’s main goal is to keep the spacecraft transmitting unique interstellar data for as long as possible, not to fully reverse the long-term shutdown trend. So the answer is yes: a 2026 power swap could revive at least one dormant instrument, especially Voyager 1’s LECP, but only if the test works and the spacecraft remain stable afterward.

2 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Jul 13

June 2024 marked Voyager 1’s return to science operations, with NASA saying all four working instruments resumed sending usable data after months of unreadable telemetry.
Engineers traced the failure to a corrupted memory location in the flight data system and restored communications by relocating code within the spacecraft’s limited onboard memory.
More than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 sends data with a 22.4-watt transmitter whose signal arrives after over 23 hours and is extracted from extreme background noise by NASA’s Deep Space Network.
The recovery matters because Voyager 1 is still sampling particles, magnetic fields and plasma waves in interstellar space, a region no other operating spacecraft is measuring.
The fix also underscored shrinking margins for the 1977 probe, whose aging systems and declining plutonium power make each restored contact harder to sustain.