NASA shut down Voyager 1's Low-energy Charged Particles instrument on April 17 to conserve power as the 49-year-old spacecraft's plutonium reactor decays and output drops. The craft loses about 4 watts annually and engineers activated this long-planned shutdown sequence to avoid triggering an automatic protective shutdown that would be harder to recover from. Two science instruments remain operational, and NASA is testing a more ambitious power-conservation fix called 'the Big Bang' scheduled for May-June 2026 that might eventually let them restore the LECP.