NASA has officially switched off one of the scientific instruments aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft, marking a significant milestone in the mission's history.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has been a remarkable achievement in human space exploration. Over the past 47 years, it has been sending valuable scientific data back to Earth from interstellar space or beyond our solar system.

One of the instruments, designed to measure the amount of plasma (electrically charged atoms) and the direction it is flowing, was no longer useful for the spacecraft's current mission, which is to measure interstellar space. As a result, NASA decided to shut it down to conserve power.

The decision to switch off the instrument was not taken lightly. The data collected by the Voyager probes is unique, as no other human-made spacecraft has operated in interstellar space. However, with the spacecraft's power source, a plutonium-powered generator, decaying every year, NASA teams have been working to postpone the time when more instruments would need to be shut down.