We’ll start things off this week with a story developing more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth – on Friday, NASA announced that a command has been sent to shut down Voyager 1’s Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) instrument. As the power produced by the spacecraft’s radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) continues to decrease, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers have been systematically shutting down various programs to extend the mission as long as possible. It is believed that shutting down the LECP should buy them another year, when engineers hope to implement a more powerful energy-saving system. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of Voyager 2. The plug was pulled on its LECP instrument in March of 2025.
JPL engineers hope that their new plan may allow them to revive systems that have been disabled in tn space probes, but even if everything goes according to plan, no fight is inevitable. Sometimes, there won’t be enough juice in the RTGs to keep the lights on. Although it will be a sad day when we have to bring you that news, surviving half a century in space is one hell of a thing.
Speaking of ending the run, just a week after Amazon announced that pre-2012 Kindles would no longer be supported, the company informed users that Kindle software for PCs will be discontinued in June. In its current form, at least. As Good e-reader reports, Amazon is developing a new client for users who want to access the Kindle ecosystem on their computers, but it will only work on Windows 11. Since the old software can be used to strip DRM from purchased ebooks, it seems that this is another attempt to close the platform down.
We are not fans of unreasonable restrictions placed on ebooks and reading devices, but on the other hand, there are systems in place that should not be tightened up a bit. For example, Quarkslab research has shown that an electronic control unit (ECU) from a wrecked car can reveal a surprising amount of information.
After taking the used ECU, they were able to dispose of its NAND flash chip and decipher the log files it contained. It turns out that the car had GPS logs going back to the day it rolled off the assembly line, and researchers were able to reconstruct every trip it ever made.
By looking at links to the last recordings posted on social media, they were even able to find photos of the accident that put the car out of action. It’s bad enough that personal information can be removed from secondary drives; now we have to worry about what happens to our cars after they are towed to the junkyard.
If this is the kind of news that keeps you on two wheels rather than four, you may be interested in the latest innovations from Škoda Auto. In an effort to reduce collisions with pedestrians, they have developed a bicycle bell that incorporates noise canceling (ANC) systems. The logic goes like this: if a person wears headphones with ANC, they may not hear the bell of an approaching bicycle. So they teamed up with researchers from the University of Salford to find weaknesses in the ANC’s existing systems.
As you might guess, unfamiliar sounds are harder to block out than constant tones. Researchers have found a gap between 750 and 780 Hz where sounds can penetrate. The device uses both principles to overcome ANC, and in testing, it was shown to give pedestrians wearing headphones more time to react to an approaching bicycle.
Finally, we’ll bring this week’s post full circle by starting and ending with a space story: earlier this week, PBS released an hour-long documentary. Artemis II: Return to the Moon on YouTube. Watching PBS shows on YouTube may seem strange, but that’s the world we live in these days. Either way, the video is an interesting look at what goes into the recently completed lunar mission and has us very excited about Artemis III and beyond.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
