Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 31 related

1. Story
2. The NASA field centre in Pasadena, California, operated under contract by the California Institute of Technology, which built and has continuously flown both Voyagers and which manages the Deep Space Network. Its distinctive contribution to this mission is institutional rather than technical: a flight team has been maintained without a break for forty-nine years, long enough that the engineers now writing commands were not born when the software they are editing was written, and the documentation for some 1970s subsystems has had to be reconstructed from paper archives and from retired staff.
3. Knowledge
4. Jet Propulsion Laboratory
5. Connections
6. Voyager 1
7. Voyager 2
8. NASA Deep Space Network
9. The full Grand Tour is cancelled and rebuilt as a two-spacecraft mission
10. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem is switched off
11. Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument is switched off
12. The "Big Bang" power manoeuvre on Voyager 2
13. Evidence
14. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem was switched off on 25 February 2025 and Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument on 24 March 2025; both spacecraft lose about four watts of generator output per year; three science instruments continued to operate on each; Voyager 1's low-energy charged particle instrument was to run through 2025 and be switched off in 2026, and Voyager 2's cosmic ray subsystem was scheduled for shutdown in 2026, with the plan expected to keep at least one instrument running on each spacecraft into the 2030s. V55 verification basis: the release was not fetched — jpl.nasa.gov and science.nasa.gov are both blocked by this session's network egress proxy — but search results carried these specific figures and dates and attributed them to this release.
15. The Deep Space Network comprises three complexes spaced roughly 120 degrees apart in longitude — Goldstone in California, Robledo de Chavela near Madrid and Tidbinbilla near Canberra — each with a 70-metre antenna and several 34-metre antennas; DSS-43 at Canberra is the only antenna capable of transmitting commands to Voyager 2, whose trajectory carries it far south of the ecliptic. V55 verification basis: THE PAGES WERE NOT REACHED — jpl.nasa.gov is blocked to this session and the search budget was exhausted. The DSS-43 uplink exclusivity is a widely reported fact that a curator should confirm, along with the dates of the antenna's 2020 upgrade outage.