Spaceship carrying music CD to aliens receives bad news

(NLDO) - NASA's famous Voyager 2 spacecraft has just had one of its scientific instruments turned off, a sign that its nearly half-century mission is coming to an end.

According to a new announcement from NASA, the Voyager 2 mission management team has just decided to permanently stop the plasma science instrument on this spacecraft.

Thus, Voyager now has only four active scientific instruments and is expected to have only one by the 2030s.

According to Science Alert, this sad decision was made by NASA to solve the problem of lack of energy to operate the spacecraft.

Voyager 2 spacecraft and the golden record sent to aliens it carried - Photo: NASA

Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 left Earth in 1977. They are powered by decaying plutonium blocks, producing less and less energy each year.

The decision to turn off some equipment to save electricity will help the ship continue operating for a while longer.

This is extremely meaningful for humanity because the Voyager duo are the spacecraft that have traveled the farthest from Earth to date.

Voyager 2 is now 20.5 billion km from Earth, while its "twin" is more than 24 billion km away.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 passed through the heliosphere in 2012 and 2018 respectively, passing through the invisible bubble structure surrounding the Solar System, escaping the influence of the Sun and entering interstellar space.

This pair of spacecraft also carried a special golden disc, recording messages from humanity in many languages, some music, some sounds and images reflecting society and the natural environment on Earth... in the hope that some aliens would find it.

NASA said that over the years, mission engineers have taken steps to avoid turning off any science instruments for as long as possible.

This time, they chose the plasma instrument — which measures the amount and direction of ionized particles passing through the spacecraft — as the first “victim” because it had collected very little data in recent years.

It's not that the device is damaged, but the plasma flow in the interstellar medium it entered a few years ago is very different, so the device cannot operate as efficiently as it did in the heliosphere.

The remaining four scientific instruments include: a magnetometer to study interplanetary magnetic fields, an instrument to measure the distribution of ions and electrons, a system to determine the origin of interstellar cosmic rays, and a plasma wave detector.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/tau-vu-tru-mang-dia-nhac-gui-nguoi-ngoai-hanh-tinh-nhan-tin-xau-196241004100218608.htm