The Voyager probes are still transmitting, 47 years later, on less power than a fridge bulb

Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977 with computers less powerful than a modern calculator, and both are still transmitting data from beyond the edge of the solar wind's influence, running on a radioisotope generator that loses about four watts of power every year.

That means engineers have spent the last two decades doing something almost nobody talks about: turning things off. Cameras, heaters, and entire instrument suites have been shut down one by one, in a carefully sequenced order, to keep the dwindling power budget alive for the instruments that matter most for interstellar measurements. Voyager 1 is currently running on roughly the wattage of a couple of household LED bulbs.

Communicating with it is its own feat. A radio signal sent from Voyager 1 takes over 23 hours to reach Earth one way, meaning any command sent today gets a confirmation nearly two days later. The team plans commands like chess moves against a clock that ticks in light-hours.

Both probes are expected to lose their last operating instrument sometime around 2025-2026, not because anything breaks, but because there will simply no longer be enough power to run even one. When that happens, they will keep flying, silent, for billions of years — the most distant objects humans have ever made, still moving, with nothing left to say.