Tech Rushi

Earlier this year,  Voyager 2  shut down. For those who forget, the  Voyager  program was an endeavor undertaken by NASA to launch two robotic probes into space. These craft, taking advantage of a rare alignment of the planets, would travel to Neptune’s orbit and beyond, gathering significant data about our solar system along the way. Incredibly, both  Voyager 1  and  2  have successfully ventured to the edge of the solar system, crossing the edge of the heliosphere in 2012 and 2018 respectively. But on January 25,  Voyager 2  attempted to calibrate its magnetic field instrument and failed. Doing so caused the probe to try and draw on additional power, which triggered a failsafe that shut down its functionality. - See, NASA’s engineers recognized that the probes would be venturing far beyond the reach of the Sun’s rays, meaning that solar power would not be sufficient enough to keep them both running. So, they fitted both of them with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs)s, whi