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NASA shuts off Voyager 1 instrument to save power 15B miles from Earth
NASA shut down one of Voyager 1’s science instruments to conserve dwindling power and keep the nearly 49-year-old spacecraft operating as it continues its journey through interstellar space more than 15 billion miles from Earth.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands Friday to turn off Voyager 1’s Low-Energy Charged Particles (LECP) experiment, a long-running instrument that has operated almost continuously since the spacecraft launched in 1977.
The move comes as the nuclear-powered probe loses about 4 watts of power each year, and mission managers work to stretch its remaining lifespan.
“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL, said in a statement. “Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored.”
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The shutdown underscores the increasingly delicate balancing act facing the Voyager team as both spacecraft age far beyond their original mission plans.
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators that convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. After nearly five decades in space, engineers have had to steadily power down heaters and instruments while making sure the spacecraft do not get so cold that key systems, including fuel lines, are put at risk.
“The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible,” Badaruddin added.
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The pressure to act intensified after Voyager 1 experienced an unexpected drop in power during a routine roll maneuver Feb. 27, according to NASA.
Engineers feared that any further decline could trigger the spacecraft’s undervoltage fault protection system, which is designed to automatically shut down components to protect the probe. Recovering from such a fault can be lengthy and carries added risk, prompting the team to move before the spacecraft did it on its own.
The two Voyager probes remain the only spacecraft far enough from Earth to collect data on “detecting pressure fronts and regions of varying particle density in the space beyond our heliosphere,” according to NASA.
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“Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room,” a NASA press release said. “They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call ‘the Big Bang,’ which is designed to further extend Voyager operations.”
“The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data,” the release continued.
The decision to turn off LECP was not made suddenly. NASA said mission science and engineering teams had years ago agreed on the order in which spacecraft systems would be shut down as available power declined. Of the 10 original instrument sets carried by the twin probes, seven have now been switched off. Voyager 2’s LECP instrument was shut down in March 2025.
Because Voyager 1 is now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, commands take roughly 23 hours to arrive. The shutdown sequence itself takes more than three hours to complete. One part of the LECP system — a small motor that rotates the sensor so it can scan in all directions — will remain powered because it uses only about half a watt. Engineers hope that could leave open the possibility of restarting the instrument in the future if more power becomes available.
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Trump DEI crackdown ‘misses core ideology’ and must target lingering danger on campuses, watchdog warns
FIRST ON FOX: Experts are calling on President Donald Trump to issue a new executive order to attack a “dominant” socialist-inspired ideology they say is the “foundation” of a growing domestic terrorist movement in the United States.
Fox News Digital exclusively reviewed a report that details how diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices have continued to thrive on hundreds of U.S. campuses through a more deeply rooted ideology, “intersectionality.” The Legal Insurrection Foundation and the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies issued the report.
“Intersectionality’s toxic influence must be confronted head-on,” the report said, emphasizing, “The future of our education system and the safety of our nation depend upon it.”
Despite several executive orders by Trump banning DEI, the report found that progressive school administrators across the country continue to profile students by group identity and to teach students to view America and Western society as global oppressors. The result, the report says, is increasing social discord and even violence spreading across America.
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The report’s authors urge the president to take executive action to address intersectionality specifically by name, arguing that doing so will close a loophole that allows DEI practices to continue under the intersectionality banner. The report also calls on the administration to replace this school of thought with education programs that promote traditional American values.
Intersectionality has been advanced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Columbia Law School professor who developed the intersectional theoretical framework in the late 1980s, as a method of describing overlapping forms of discrimination. She argues that by treating race and gender as “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis,” society and the legal system distort and theoretically erase the multidimensional experiences of Black women.
The Legal Insurrection Foundation and the Defense of Freedom Institute’s report, however, cautions that intersectionality is “inherently socialist and collectivist,” as it “judges people based on group identity.” By emphasizing the “intersection” of perceived victimhood categories, the report says women are seen as preferable to men, “people of color” to Whites, homosexual or transgender-identifying people as preferable to heterosexuals, and Muslims as preferable to Jews or Christians.
While the report says the Trump administration’s efforts to address DEI thus far are “laudable,” these actions continue to be flouted so that the U.S. educational system remains “the mechanism for intersectionality to embed in the culture.”
According to the report, the groups have documented the propagation of intersectionality in more than 700 educational institutions, consisting primarily of college campuses but also K-12 schools.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Legal Insurrection founder William Jacobson cautioned that “as much as some of the problems have been recognized, the underlying ideological foundation has not been identified or understood.”
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He explained that intersectionality goes even deeper than DEI, saying that it is “in many ways, the mother’s milk of critical race theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and increasingly linked to violent domestic terrorism through anarchists and other groups.”
He described the ongoing movement as a “multi-billion-dollar industry” consisting of teachers, professors, administrators, consultants and philanthropies.
“It’s massive,” he explained, adding, “This was 30 years in the making. It’s not going to go away with a handful of executive orders.”
The report draws a line between the intersectional ideology being pushed in schools and recent domestic terror plots, including by the anti-capitalist student group “Turtle Island Liberation Front.” This December, five members of the group were indicted for allegedly plotting to simultaneously bomb multiple targets in California beginning on New Year’s Eve. The individuals are also accused of plotting to target U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers as well.
According to the report, “Turtle Island,” a term rooted in Native American lore, is the intersectional name being used for North America. Turtle Island Liberation Front’s call for decolonization and tribal sovereignty echoes intersectionality’s core message, says the report.
Both groups, as well as Jacobson, are calling on the president and Congress to take immediate action through executive orders and congressional hearings.
“We’re calling on the administration to update their executive orders [and] to issue a new executive order which includes intersectionality under the definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” he said.
Jacobson emphasized that while any individual scholar or student can hold or advance intersectional beliefs, he said, “the question is, are federal funds being used to promote unlawful discrimination?”
“We are not calling for a ban on intersectionality as a theory,” he clarified. “What we are calling on the government to do is to make sure that federal funds are not used to promote racially and ethnically and religiously discriminatory activities that take place under the name of intersectionality.”
He put it in simple terms: “People may have a constitutional right to espouse intersectionality, but the government doesn’t have to pay for it.”
Beyond this, he also called on Congress to get involved.
“We’ve seen on many issues, including antisemitism, that congressional hearings have proven extremely informative and extremely effective at addressing the problems,” he said.
The report also calls for the administration to use every facet of the government to root out intersectionality. Other methods suggested include updating federal agency guidance regarding intersectional practices, pursuing litigation where it is being practiced, defunding those institutions, and instead funding research and civics education programs that promote American ideals.
“It’s hard to understand unless you live in that world, which I do, how pervasive and dominant these racial ideologies are on campuses,” he emphasized, adding, “It is the dominant ideology on campuses.”
“There are very few alternatives for students on most campuses,” he went on. “And that’s why we think the Trump administration, to the extent it is supporting various educational initiatives, should insist that schools, if they want federal money, have to have traditional American civics programming as an alternative to what is there now.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Crenshaw for comment.
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US falls behind in hypersonic race as China, Russia gain edge
The U.S. has spent years racing to develop hypersonic weapons to compete with China and Russia, but delays, shifting programs and limited testing capacity are raising concerns that Washington remains in a catch-up phase in a technology that could reshape modern warfare.
Key programs have faced repeated delays, including setbacks in testing and development timelines, while others have been canceled and later revived as the Pentagon reassesses its approach.
At the same time, limited testing infrastructure has constrained how quickly new systems can be evaluated and refined, slowing the pace of development across multiple efforts.
That combination has heightened concern inside the Pentagon, particularly as China and Russia already have fielded hypersonic systems, potentially giving them an edge in a class of weapons that could compress decision-making timelines in a crisis and challenge U.S. defenses.
Hypersonic weapons are designed to travel at extremely high speeds while maneuvering in flight, making them far harder to detect and intercept than traditional missiles.
Unlike ballistic missiles, which follow a predictable path, hypersonic weapons can change direction mid-flight and fly at lower altitudes, reducing warning time and making them more difficult for existing missile defenses to track.
Russia already has used hypersonic-type weapons in its war against Ukraine, in some cases as a signal to Kyiv and its Western allies, underscoring how the technology is beginning to shape real-world conflict.
Inside the U.S. portfolio, however, progress has been uneven. Some programs are advancing toward deployment, others have been canceled and revived, and officials are increasingly balancing investments between building hypersonic weapons and defending against them.
Part of the challenge is technical. Hypersonic systems must survive extreme heat and pressure while traveling at high speeds through the atmosphere—making them more complex to design and build than traditional missiles.
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In some cases, the Pentagon also has pursued more advanced approaches, including highly maneuverable systems and precision conventional strike capabilities, adding further complexity.
Complicating that effort further is a basic constraint: testing capacity.
With only a limited number of facilities able to simulate or sustain hypersonic speeds, programs often face delays waiting for test opportunities, slowing development across multiple efforts.
Mark Bigham, vice president of defense programs at Longshot, a company that works on hypersonic launch and testing technologies, and a former Raytheon executive, said that constraint has become a key limiting factor.
“People can innovate and create really fast,” Bigham said. “And the only way you can sort them out is to actually test them.”
He added that only a handful of facilities can test systems at hypersonic speeds, making it difficult to increase the pace of development.
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“I would say the testing is probably the bottleneck right now,” he said.
Beyond engineering and testing challenges, the U.S. effort has also been shaped by years of shifting priorities.
After leading early hypersonic research in the 2000s, defense spending shifted toward counterterrorism operations and other capabilities, while funding for high-speed weapons remained inconsistent until more recently.
At the same time, strict safety and reliability requirements can slow the transition from testing to deployment, extending timelines compared to adversaries that may field less mature systems more quickly.
The Pentagon’s most advanced effort, the Army’s long-range hypersonic weapon — known as “Dark Eagle” — has made recent progress, including a successful joint Army–Navy test in March and continued fielding of its first operational unit.
That program is part of a broader push to streamline development, including the use of a shared glide body across Army and Navy systems.
Even so, the broader hypersonic portfolio remains in flux.
The Air Force has revived its air-launched rapid response weapon, or ARRW, after shelving the program following test setbacks, requesting roughly $387 million in fiscal 2026 to begin procurement.
The move reflects a reassessment inside the Pentagon, where officials now see a need for multiple types of hypersonic weapons for different missions.
At the same time, the U.S. increasingly is investing in ways to counter hypersonic threats.
In April, the Missile Defense Agency awarded roughly $475 million in additional funding to Northrop Grumman to accelerate development of the Glide Phase Interceptor, designed to destroy hypersonic weapons mid-flight.
The funding has pushed the program’s timeline forward, with initial operational capability now expected in the early 2030s after earlier delays.
The effort is part of a broader push to build defenses against hypersonic threats, including a space-based tracking network designed to detect and follow missiles traveling at extreme speeds—something current radar systems struggle to do reliably.
The urgency stems from the fact that China and Russia already have fielded hypersonic weapons, forcing the U.S. to both accelerate its own development and rethink how it defends against a new class of threats.
“My gut tells me that we need to step on the gas and move faster,” Bigham said.
Yet despite that urgency, the administration’s latest budget places greater emphasis on missile defense, drones and other capabilities, with hypersonic programs largely embedded within broader research and procurement accounts.
That disconnect — between the strategic importance of hypersonics and the pace of U.S. development — has fueled debate over whether the U.S. can scale these systems quickly enough to compete with its adversaries.
For now, the Pentagon’s hypersonic effort is moving forward — but with programs at different stages, revived initiatives and persistent constraints, the path to fully fielding these weapons remains uncertain.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Government Accountability Office review found the Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program fell about six months behind schedule on a key design milestone, pushing flight testing back by roughly a year and reducing the number of planned test flights. The findings highlight broader delays affecting U.S. hypersonic development.
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Dark money floods Virginia ahead of redistricting vote that could hand Democrats House edge
Tens of millions of dollars — much of it dark money from undisclosed donors — poured into Virginia this year ahead of Tuesday’s vote on a congressional redistricting referendum that, if passed, could give Democrats a significant boost in the battle for the U.S. House majority in this year’s midterm elections.
If the ballot measure is successful, it would give the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature — rather than the state’s current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.
The referendum, which follows President Donald Trump’s push for rare but not unheard-of mid-decade redistricting in Republican-led states, could give Democrats an edge as they try to win back control of the House from Republicans, who are defending a fragile majority.
Supporters of redistricting have dramatically outraised and outspent groups opposed to the referendum, with Democrat-aligned Virginians for Fair Elections raising roughly three times as much as GOP-allied Virginians for Fair Maps. But despite the Democrats’ funding advantage, public opinion polling suggests support for the ballot initiative is only slightly ahead of opposition amid a surge in early voting, which ended Saturday.
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“They have outspent us three to one. They’ve raised over $70 million. And yet this is a close vote,” former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, one of leaders of the GOP effort to defeat the referendum, told Fox News Digital on the eve of the election.
Much of the funding raised by both sides came from so-called “dark money” from nonprofit public policy groups known as 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their donors. This according to a Fox News Digital review of state campaign finance records and records from the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), which tracks public spending in Virginia..
“It points to the importance of this referendum,” David Richards, political science chair at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, told Fox News Digital, as he highlighted the influx of outside money pouring into the state.
Richards said the funding “also shows how national money can cloud these statewide elections. Virginians need to decide what’s good for them and instead, it becomes a national issue that takes away from what is good for Virginia.”
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Given the green light from the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, nonprofit public policy groups can spend unlimited funds without disclosing their donors, which often masks large contributions from corporations or wealthy individuals.
But dark money has long come under attack over a lack of transparency, with voters not knowing who is funding the political messages they are seeing. It’s been criticized as a threat to democracy for allowing wealthy interests to influence elections and policy.
“it’s because you don’t actually know where the money is coming from,” Chris Galdieri, a professor in the political science department at Saint Anselm College, told Fox News Digital. “With dark money, it’s not even traceable to a particular interest…it means that voters don’t know what the motives of the donors are.”
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On the “yes” side, House Majority Forward, which as the chief political nonprofit wing of House Democrats does not have to disclose its donors, has contributed nearly $40 million.
Other groups pumping big bucks into the Democrat effort to pass the referendum were fueled with millions of dollars from George Soros-backed dark money groups.
Meanwhile, the “no” effort has received $9 million from a group tied to tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a GOP megadonor and longtime Trump ally.
While often frowned upon, the use of dark money in politics is accelerating. Dark money groups shelled out more than $1.9 billion during the 2024 election cycle.
“Any rational person can look at the maps in Virginia and understand that this is a political game being played. It’s to benefit one party, not people,” veteran Republican strategist and communicator Ryan Williams argued. “What do they care if they finance their effort with dark money. It’s just another example of political gamesmanship in this process.”
Fox News’ Alec Schemmel and Leo Briceno contributed to this report.
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