NASA’s longest-running spacecraft Voyager 1 is sending information back to Earth again for the first time since November.

Scientists have managed to fix a problem on the probe, which was launched 46 years ago, after five months of silence.

On 14 November last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data back to Earth, even though scientists could tell it was still receiving their commands and working well otherwise.

It was first launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2. The pair are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space, which is the space between stars.

The Voyager probes send back never-seen-before information about our galaxy. Since they blasted off in 1977, they have revealed details in Saturn’s rings, provided the first in-depth images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune and discovered the rings of Jupiter.

Although their cameras are switched off to conserve power and memory, they are still sending back information that would be impossible to get anywhere else.

With all this data stuck onboard and the spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA scientists needed to fix the problem remotely.

The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed in March that the issue was with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers. That computer, called the flight data subsystem, is responsible for packaging the data up before it is sent back to Earth.

Within the computer, a single chip containing some of the computer’s software code had stopped working. Without that code, the data was unusable.

The engineers couldn’t pop over and fix it. Instead, on 18 April, they remotely split the code across different parts of the computer.

Then they had to wait to see if their fix had worked.

It takes around 22-and-a-half hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and another 22-and-a-half hours for a response to come back.

On 20 April, the team got good news. For the first time in five months, they were in contact with Voyager 1 again and could check the health and status of the spacecraft.

Now, they’ll adjust the rest of the computer so it can begin sending back more data.

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Voyager 2 is working normally and heading towards a star called Ross 248. It’ll come within 1.7 light years of it in around 40,000 years.

Voyager 1 will almost reach a star in the Little Dipper constellation in 38,200 years from now.

A celebrity handbag designer whose products have been used by Britney Spears and on Sex And The City has been jailed for smuggling crocodile handbags into the US for fashion shows.

Nancy Gonzalez, 71, admitted recruiting couriers to carry as many as four products each on commercial flights from her native Colombia to the US for New York Fashion Week, among other high-profile events.

Gonzalez, who was arrested in 2022 in Cali, and later extradited to the US, was sentenced to 18 months in a federal court in Miami on Monday for breaking US wildlife laws.

The handbags, made from the hides of caiman and pythons bred in captivity, were worth as much as $2m (£1.6m), prosecutors said, but the designer’s lawyers said each skin cost only around $140 (£113).

Sometimes she failed to obtain the proper import permits from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, something backed by a widely ratified international treaty governing the trade in endangered and threatened species, the court heard.

Holding back tears, Gonzalez told the court before sentencing that she deeply regretted not fully complying with US laws.

She said: “From the bottom of my heart, I apologise to the United States of America. I never intended to offend a country to which I owe immense gratitude. Under pressure, I made poor decisions.”

Salma Hayek, Britney Spears and Victoria Beckham are among celebrities who bought Gonzalez’s carefully crafted handbags.

Her work was also included in a 2008 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In court, her lawyers played a 2019 video of top buyers from Bergdorf Goodman, Saks and others praising the designer’s creativity, productivity and humanity.

But prosecutor Thomas Watts-Fitzgerald said the retailers “must be regretting they were ever put up to that and if they heard it was presented in court they would cringe”.

“They have their own brand to protect,” he added.

Mr Watts-Fitzgerald, who compared Gonzalez’s behaviour to that of drug traffickers, said her activities were “all driven by the money”.

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Her lawyers pleaded for leniency for the woman, who, they said, created “the very first luxury, high-end fashion company from a third world country,” which later competed with industry giants like Dior, Prada and Gucci.

They also argued that only 1% of the merchandise she imported into the US lacked proper papers and were samples for New York Fashion Week and other events.

Prosecutors had been seeking a stiffer sentence of 30 to 37 months. But the judge said he was taking into account the nearly 14 months she spent in a Colombian prison awaiting extradition.

She was ordered to begin her sentence on 6 June.

Five people – including two children – have been found dead at a house in the US state of Oklahoma, police have said.

All five appear to have been murdered, according to police sergeant Gary Knight.

“This wasn’t a carbon monoxide situation, or anything like that – these are five people who were killed,” he added.

Mr Knight said a man and a woman were among those found dead at the home in the southwest side of Oklahoma City.

Mustang Public Schools superintendent Charles Bradley said two other victims were current students – one in sixth grade, the other in ninth – while the fifth victim was a recent graduate of the school system.

He wrote an email to families on Monday, saying the school community was “shocked, and our hearts are broken, this tragedy simply defies understanding”.

According to a report in local newspaper The Oklahoman, police said a 10-year-old had found the bodies.

The incident is being investigated as a shooting, after a gun was found on top of a man’s body, they added.