The probe launched almost 50 years ago and is the farthest human-made object from Earth. Shutting down one of its scientific devices will help it conserve energy and continue traveling toward the edge of the solar system Mission engineers have shut down Voyager 1's Low-energy Charged Particles experiment. NASA / JPL-Caltech In 1977, NASA launched an ambitious mission : Two spacecraft called Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 blasted off to investigate Jupiter and Saturn. They’re still gathering data today—now, in interstellar space—and they continue to hurtle toward the edge of the solar system . Voyager 1 is now about 15.8 billion miles from Earth, making it the most distant human-made object. But to keep the decades-old probe chugging along, NASA shut down one of its scientific instruments on April 17, per a statement . “We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” former Voyager project manager  John Casani  said in a NASA  statement  in 2024.…