NASA's longest-running spacecraft back in touch with Earth after five months of silence

NASA Reestablishes , Connection With Distant , Voyager 1 Space Probe. The news comes after engineers at the agency worked for months attempting to fix the 46-year-old probe. In December, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said that the probe, now a staggering 15 billion miles away from Earth, was transmitting gibberish code. . On April 23, the JPL announced that the team was once again receiving usable data from the spacecraft. Currently, the probe is only transmitting data regarding the status of the ship's engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again, JPL statement, via 'The Guardian'. 'The Guardian' reports that Voyager 1 has been in operation for nearly half a century after launching in 1977 with the goal of studying Jupiter and Saturn. In August of 2012, Voyager crossed into interstellar space, becoming the first human-made object to leave the solar system. The probe is currently traveling at a staggering 36,800 miles per hour through space. NASA plans to collect data from the two Voyager spacecraft for a few more years, but the space agency expects to lose contact with the probes within the next decade