Voyager-1, launched into space in 1977 and now more than 24 billion kilometres away in interstellar space, has resumed sending signals back to Earth after a glitch resulted in months of corrupted messages, the BBC reports.
The 46-year-old craft is so distant that its radio messages take 22-and-a-half hours to reach NASA receivers.
A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this, BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos reports.
Voyager-1 was launched from Earth in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets, but then just kept going.
It moved beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun − a domain known as the heliosphere − in 2012, and is now embedded in interstellar space, which contains the gas, dust and magnetic fields from other stars.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmgill/34685663916]