Hope returns — "Engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally." Enlarge / A Voyager space probe in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977. Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft. Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers ...