No longer talking alien

The Voyager 1 probe - the most distant man-made object in the universe - has finally stopped spouting gibberish.

Launched in 1977 and expected to last only five years, the spacecraft is returning readable information to ground control after stopping to do so last November.

NASA teams singled out a malfunctioning chip, and devised a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of the probe's 46-year-old computer system.

"Voyager 1 is returning usable data about its systems," NASA said. "The next step is to enable it to return science data again."

The computers aboard the probes each have in total less than 70 kilobytes of memory, or just enough to store an average jpeg file. They shouldn't be any smarter than your father's smartphone.

And yet in 2012 Voyager 1 became mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium - beyond Pluto if you're imagining it - and is currently more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth. Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.

The probes' power banks are expected to be depleted sometime after 2025. They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.