In 2023 a single corrupted bit of code sent Voyager 1 into months of unintelligible static, and a team of engineers — many of them retired, called back specifically because no one else understood the system — managed to locate the fault and revive a spacecraft 24 billion kilometres away

On November 14, 2023, Voyager 1 stopped making sense. The spacecraft was still there. Its radio signal was still arriving on Earth, faint but steady, after a journey of more than 22 hours at the speed of light. But the data it carried had become meaningless — a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, the