Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. 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.
Imagine you have a paper balloon setup. It randomly takes hits from a high powered rifle. In theory, you could harvest the energy. However, it’s delivered in such powerful, random bursts that capturing it is difficult.
Gamma rays punch straight through the structure of the craft. The actual energy is small (around 1/1,000,000 of a joule), but it’s so focused that it damages anything it hits. If it hits the atoms in a transistor, that transistor gets ripped up at an atomic level.