Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS)

Assembled from 11 blocks · 2 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. The particle telescope that measures energetic charged particles — galactic cosmic rays arriving from outside the heliosphere and anomalous cosmic rays produced within it. Its readings are one of the two signatures that identify a heliopause crossing: as the spacecraft leaves the Sun's bubble, the anomalous component drops away and the galactic component rises sharply. The instrument was switched off on Voyager 1 on 25 February 2025 to save power. On Voyager 2 it was still running in August 2026, and was one of the instruments whose shutdown the July 2026 power manoeuvre deferred. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS)
5. Connections
6. Voyager 2
7. Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem is switched off
8. The "Big Bang" power manoeuvre on Voyager 2
9. Evidence
10. 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.
11. On 9 July 2026 JPL executed a single command sequence switching off two heaters and a digital tape recorder retained only for its residual heat while switching on two different heaters and a further heat-supplying device, reducing power demand by close to ten watts a year; without it another Voyager 2 instrument would have been shut down before the end of 2026, and the saving is expected to keep three instruments running for at least an additional year, with engineers suggesting up to about two extra years per spacecraft. V55 verification basis: this is secondary reporting of a JPL action; no JPL statement was retrieved, and the descriptions of exactly which devices were switched differ slightly between outlets.