At over 15 billion miles away from Earth, the Voyager 1 spacecraft (launched in 1977) continues to fight against the dying of the light. After a worrying period of silence caused by a fault protection system shutting down its main X-band transmitter, NASA engineers managed to re-establish contact.

To do this, they had to send a command prompting the probe to switch to its backup S-band radio transmitter - a piece of hardware that had not been powered on since 1981! Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles (nearly 25 billion kilometers) away from Earth - not far away from a full light-day.

The fact that engineers can diagnose, troubleshoot, and fix a 47-year-old spacecraft coasting through the freezing void of interstellar space is a testament to the absolute brilliance of its original design. Long may she continue to explore the darkness.