In November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft’s code with it. They couldn’t fly out and replace a chip, so they rewrote the code in pieces and tucked it into other spots in the computer’s memory. Every command took about 22 and a half hours to reach the spacecraft and another 22 and a half for an answer to come back. On April 20, 2024, the team finally heard usable data again and celebrated in a conference room, and by June all four of its science instruments were working again.
