Overview
- As of July 2026, Voyager 1 remains operational in interstellar space and continues to return scientific and engineering data using a reduced set of instruments.
- NASA’s status updates show only two science instruments still running on Voyager 1: the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem.
- Engineers have been progressively shutting down nonessential systems to conserve power, with the cosmic ray detector turned off in February 2025 and the low‑energy charged particle instrument shut in April 2026.
- Communications are already slow—a one‑way radio signal takes more than 22 hours now—and NASA lists November 18, 2026 as the date a command will need 24 hours to reach the spacecraft.
- Mission teams must plan multi‑day command sequences and recover the probe from occasional faults as its plutonium‑238 RTG output falls, and the craft will keep coasting with the Golden Record long after its instruments go silent.