Broadcasts of the pair of Voyager spacecraft may stop being recorded starting in October to save money for NASA. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, are respectively 14 billion and 11 billion kilometers from Earth
Broadcasts of the pair of Voyager spacecraft may stop being recorded starting in October to save money for NASA. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched in 1977 are respectively 14 billion and 11 billion kilometers from Earth. They are on their final mission to locate the boundary between the realm of the sun and interstellar space, but the budget of NASA's Earth-Sun Division for next year has been cut from $74 million to $53 million, meaning the project will have to be shelved.
Although the Voyager spacecraft are expected to have at least another 15 years of life, their operation is expensive, and it costs NASA 4.2 million dollars per year to operate and analyze the data. Other missions like Ulysses, launched in 1990 to explore the Sun's polar regions, may be abandoned after the end of the fiscal year in October.
Although the decision is not yet final, some NASA scientists are preparing for the worst. Voyager project scientist Edward Stone of Caltech told Nature magazine: "We are already planning a system shutdown plan."
