NASA has announced that Voyager 2’s mission has been extended until 2026 thanks to a recent hack that redirects a small amount of power meant for an onboard safety system to the probe’s five scientific instruments. This means that all five instruments can remain active until 2026, with the science data the Voyager probes are returning becoming more valuable the further they get from the sun. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 has visited several planets in the outer solar system before reaching the outer fringes of the heliosphere – a protective region of space that surrounds the sun and shields Earth from harmful radiation from interstellar space. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the latter being the slower of the two, remain active and are gathering unprecedented data about the heliosphere and its protective qualities. As a result of continual decay, generators on both probes lose power each year. This has not affected their science gathering, but mission planners have had to turn off heaters and other non-essential systems to compensate for the ongoing power loss. For Voyager 2, it was getting to the stage where one science instrument needed to be turned off as early as next year. However, the probe is now stealing some of the backup power provisioned for an onboard safety mechanism to keep all five of its science instruments on. Despite the risk involved in this, the payoff, which is more science from Voyager 2, is worth it, according to Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at JPL. “We’ve been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working,” she said. The voltage spike risk is minor at this stage of the mission, and the engineering team is able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. The newly implemented hack may also be implemented on Voyager 1 if it works well on Voyager 2.