NASA's Voyager finally phoned home with a device unused since 1981

At 15.4 billion miles away from Earth in interstellar space, Voyager 1 won't last much longer. In fact, NASA's flight engineers may have thought the 47-year-old mission had finally kicked the bucket when the uncrewed spacecraft recently went quiet. The probe had shut off its main radio transmitter for communicating with mission control. Voyager's problem began on Oct. 16, when flight controllers sent the robotic explorer a somewhat routine command to turn on a heater. Two days later, w