When will Voyager 1 go silent and what are NASA’s plans for its final days?

Communication depends on Voyager’s 3.7-metre high-gain antenna transmitting narrow, low-power X-band radio signals. Those signals are captured by NASA’s Deep Space Network, three arrays of huge dishes in California, Spain and Australia, which amplify and decode the faint transmissions. The probe transmits slowly and in short bursts, storing data onboard and sending it in low-rate streams that the DSN reconstructs into usable science and engineering telemetry.