DEEP SPACE: NASA squeezes more life from 47-year-old Voyager probes.

Voyager 1 and 2 continue to make history every day, as they transmit data back to Earth while traveling further into deep space. But there will come a time when amassing distance is all they are capable of accomplishing. At some point, the batteries aboard each 47-year-old spacecraft will finally die, rendering the scientific probes into interstellar monuments to themselves.

However, NASA isn’t ready to say goodbye just yet, and is taking measures to get as much life out of the pair as possible. On March 5, Voyager mission engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California confirmed they have already turned off Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem experiment. NASA plans to do the same for Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24. Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd explained cutting each program is a matter of life-or-death for both machines.

“Electrical power is running low,” Dodd said in a statement. “If we don’t turn off an instrument on each Voyager now, they would probably have only a few more months of power before we would need to declare ‘end of mission.’”

Incredible.