Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Voyager 2 a command sequence on 9 July that switched three power-hungry devices off and three cheaper ones on at the same instant, then followed with a software update that locked the new arrangement into the spacecraft's fallback settings. The manoeuvre freed close to 10 watts aboard a spacecraft about 21.4 billion km from Earth, and it bought the probe's three surviving instruments at least another year of work in interstellar space.Both steps travelled the same route, through a single antenna in Australia, with the signal taking just under 20 hours each way. NASA published the result on 4 August, four weeks after the fact.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.
As a technology journalist with over sixteen years of experience, I have travelled the world and the seven seas, covered every major tech conference worth its lanyard, chronicled the defining breakthroughs of the last decade and a half, and played a pivotal role in launching some of India’s most important technology publishing platforms across web, print and TV.
