Washington, United States:

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning useful information to ground control after months of incoherence, the US space agency announced Monday.

The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, although controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single faulty chip was to blame, and devised a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory limitations of its 46-year-old computer system.

“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning useful data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” the agency said.

“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was, in 2012, mankind’s first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. A message sent from Earth takes about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.

Both Voyager spacecraft carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper discs intended to relay the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

It contains a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing receivers the date of the spaceship’s launch, and tells them how to play the record.

The record’s content, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, includes encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.

Their power banks are expected to run out sometime after 2025. They will then continue to wander the galaxy, potentially for eternity, in silence.

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