NASA powers off a piece of Voyager 2 science to save power

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. CNN — The NASA team overseeing the iconic Voyager 2 spacecraft made the decision to power down one of its science instruments in an effort to conserve energy. Mission engineers sent a command to shutter the Voyager 2’s Plasma Science, or PLS, experiment — which was used to observe solar winds — on September 26 using the Deep Space Network, a series of massive radio antennae that can beam information billions of miles through space. Despite the aging probe’s emptying power stores, NASA expects that Voyager 2 will keep operating with at least one science instrument into the 2030s. After reaching beyond the heliosphere, or interstellar space, Voyager 2 has “collected limited data in recent years due to its orientation relative to the direction that plasma is flowing,” NASA said.