NASA engineers working to extend the Voyager missions cannot physically touch the spacecraft, cannot send a replacement part, and must wait nearly 24 hours for every command to arrive — and another 24 hours for the reply — yet they just bought Voyager 2 at least a year of extra life

What NASA engineers do have is a radio link, decades of documentation and the ability to rethink how the hardware already aboard the probe is used. The “nearly 24 hours” figure in the headline fits the more distant Voyager 1. For Voyager 2, NASA gives a one-way light time of about 19½ hours. Science instruments followed only when the power budget left no reasonable alternative. Engineers found nearly a year’s worth of science inside the difference between two ways of running the same old hardware.