Engineers have turned off an instrument that measured the density of charged particles in an effort to keep the aging Voyager 1 operational. An artist's concept of Voyager 1. NASA Voyager 1, one of NASA’s longest continuously running interplanetary missions, had another instrument turned off last week, in an effort to keep the spacecraft operational. On April 17th, controllers turned off the Low-Energy Charged Particles experiment (LECP), which had been operating nearly continuously for almost 49 years. The LECP records charged particles in the interstellar medium, including both those coming from the Sun and from the wider galaxy. It was vital to measuring particle density in the region beyond our heliosphere, detecting pressure fronts and regions of varying density. The same instrument on Voyager 2 was already turned off in 2025.…