“Over the past three years NASA has shut down heaters and other nonessential components, eking out the spacecrafts’ remaining energy stores to extend their unprecedented journeys to about 2030.”
Two probes launched in 1977 are still sending science from beyond the heliopause, on plutonium that loses about four watts a year. Engineers switched off a heater expecting an instrument to die, and it kept working. The whole trip depended on a planetary lineup that comes once every 176 years, spotted by a grad student with a pencil. Nobody gets that lucky twice.