A ghost has come back to life. Voyager 1, a spacecraft dispatched in the 1970s that had been sending signals back to Earth continuously until it malfunctioned in November, has been revived. Nasa engineers revealed recently that, thanks to some clever workarounds, they had remotely fixed the corrupted memory in one of its three onboard computers.

Gone is the melancholic string of ones and zeroes that signalled little beyond a pulse. Voyager 1, now outside the solar system and the most distant man-made object at 24 billion km away, has begun sending meaningful signals once again.