Скачать или смотреть The End of Voyager : NASA’s Greatest Explorer!

Voyager 1 is humanity’s most distant spacecraft, launched in 1977, and it has been traveling through the vast emptiness of interstellar space for decades. But after nearly 50 years, its energy is running low. Many people wonder: “Why didn’t NASA just give it solar panels so it could run forever?” The answer is simple—Voyager is now so far from the Sun that light reaching it is incredibly faint, far too weak to power any solar panel.

Instead of relying on sunlight, Voyager was equipped with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), a type of nuclear battery powered by plutonium-238. This special fuel gives off heat as it decays, and that heat is converted into electricity to keep Voyager’s systems alive. It was a brilliant solution for deep space exploration, but even this power source is not infinite. Every year, the RTG loses about 4 watts of power, slowly forcing NASA to shut down non-essential instruments and systems.

Over the years, NASA has carefully managed Voyager’s dwindling energy, turning off heaters, cameras, and other instruments one by one. As of 2025, some of its scientific devices are already being deactivated. Still, Voyager continues to send valuable data from a region of space no spacecraft has ever explored before. But by 2030 at the latest, the last of its instruments will go silent, and Voyager will drift quietly through interstellar space forever—a lonely traveler carrying a golden record with messages from Earth.

Voyager’s journey is a reminder of both the limits of our technology and the incredible ambition of human exploration. It shows how far curiosity and innovation can take us, even to the edge of the solar system and beyond. And even when it finally falls silent, Voyager will remain out there, a silent messenger from Earth, traveling among the stars for billions of years.

If you love space, astronomy, and the incredible stories of exploration, make sure to subscribe for more content like this. 🚀✨