Eight months after NASA engineers feared the spacecraft has lost function, Voyager 1’s four scientific instruments are now back online and sending data back to Earth from about 15 billion miles away, The Verge reports. After the signals coming from Voyager 1 were indecipherable starting last November, engineers essentially hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and reset all the systems very slowly because radio signals take 45 hours to get there.
NASA reported, however, that the four scientific systems on the craft–measuring plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particle–had all returned usable data in the past week, with the reset of a syncing system required as part of some final maintenance. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the farthest manmade object from Earth. Some estimate the craft could continue to function into 2036.