NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has re-established communication with Earth after a period of sending indecipherable data.

The anomaly was resolved by fixing a malfunctioning chip in the probe's decades-old computer system.

Restoration of communication now allows NASA to receive valuable engineering data from the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 is currently over 15 billion miles away, with signals taking approximately 22.5 hours to travel between Earth and the spacecraft.

The spacecraft, launched in 1977, has been journeying through interstellar space since 2012.

Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1, continues to operate normally at a distance of 12.6 billion miles.