The decision comes as the Voyager spacecraft face diminishing power supplies due to the gradual decay of their radioactive plutonium. Going where no spacecraft has gone before: NASA shuts down ...

Most RTGs are built using plutonium-238 as their source ... capture the power of RTGs quite like the Voyager missions. NASA launched the twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977 to take ...

Both Voyager probes are equipped with a radioisotope power system, a nuclear battery that uses the heat of decaying plutonium to generate electricity. The system produced 470 watts of power at ...

They were the third and fourth spacecraft to visit Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 was the first ... As their supply of plutonium-238 dwindles, the generators lose four watts of output per ...

Each Voyager spacecraft launched with a nuclear power source made of plutonium. It was the sensible choice—engineers knew all along that the probes would be traveling much too far from the sun ...

The Voyager spacecraft rely on electricity generated from the heat of decaying plutonium, and both are losing an estimated 4 watts of power per year. “The Voyagers have been deep space rock ...

Each probe is powered by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) fueled by decaying plutonium-238. The RTG arrays offered Voyager 1 and 2 about 470 watts at 30 volts when they first ...

Voyager 2 was the first and remains the only spacecraft to fly past Uranus and Neptune, worlds where it discovered superfast winds, more than a dozen moons and six new rings, as well as Uranus’s ...