Voyager 2’s three surviving instruments are part of humanity’s only direct scientific presence in interstellar space—and with no approved successor under development, engineers remotely reconfigured the 49-year-old probe’s power system in July 2026, completing a delicate operation across a 39-hour command-and-response delay that should preserve its science for at least another year.
Voyager 2 is nearly 50 years old, losing about 4 watts of power every year as its plutonium power source fades — and NASA just bought it at least another year of science with an all-at-once power-system swap engineers called the “Big Bang,” performed on a spacecraft with razor-thin power margins and no possibility of physical repair.
Scientists thought Titan was hiding a global ocean beneath its frozen crust. But a 2025 reanalysis of Cassini data points to something stranger instead — a roughly 380-kilometre-thick layer of slushy ice, close to melting and likely threaded with pockets of liquid water that could reach 20°C near the rocky interior.
JPL's management contract is suddenly up for grabs for the first time since the 1930s, and NASA's own language shows why this is more than a routine procurement fight