Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have conserved energy supplies on the record-setting Voyager 1 & 2 deep space probes nearly 50 years after their missions launched to extend them further.

Mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California turned off the cosmic ray subsystem experiment aboard Voyager 1 on Feb. 25 and will shut off Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24.

NASA is switching off two science instruments on its twin Voyager spacecraft to save power. The space agency said Wednesday an instrument on Voyager 2 that measures charged particles and cosmic rays will shut off later this month.

“On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything from smartphones to airplanes,” Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program, said in a statement. “Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals at the Moon.”

The new milestone means NASA’s exploration missions could benefit from these signals to accurately and autonomously determine their position, velocity and time.

Two stranded NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, are just a few weeks away from finally returning to Earth after spending nine months in space.

Two Nasa astronauts stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) since last summer have been giving an update on their return to Earth - watch their news conference back at the top of the page Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore left Earth in June 2024 for an eight-day mission to test Boeing Starliner's capsule But Nasa decided to keep them on the ISS after the capsule suffered technical problems and returned to Earth empty "We came up prepared to stay long,