Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.



Is there radiation between stars? I’m sure it’s cold tho.
Plenty. Unfortunately it’s mostly the nasty damaging kind, rather than the sort that can be turned into power. It also doesn’t take much damage to add up, when you’re dealing with large millennia time scales.