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Nasa's Voyager 1 space probe has started sending nonsensical data back to Earth after making a journey of billions of miles and travelling for nearly 50 years in space.

First launched in 1977, the spacecraft was originally on a five year mission to fly past Jupiter and Saturn but has continued to venture further into space for the past 46 years, becoming the first human-made object to leave the solar system.

As of 2023 signals from Voyager 1 typically take more than 22 hours to reach Earth, but Nasa says the probe, which is currently 15 billion miles away from our planet, has suffered a communications glitch.

Voyager 1 has three onboard computers, they include flight data that collects information from the spacecraft's scientific instruments and engineering data, which is a little bit like a coded health bar, showing how Voyager 1 is doing.

On Earth, Nasa receives the data in binary code, a type of coding that uses zeroes and ones to represent letters, numbers, and symbols. It is called binary code because it's made of only two symbols.

But now the probe is repeating itself, sending the same bit of code over and over again, leading scientists to suspect it is broken.

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory - which manages many of the space agency's robotic missions said on social media that "The NASA Voyager team is investigating an issue with Voyager 1's Flight Data System. The spacecraft is receiving and executing commands sent from Earth but not returning useable data".

Last year Nasa announced it was powering down some of Voyager 1 and its sister craft Voyager 2's systems, this means they can both operate for as long as possible until their plutonium power source runs out.

It's expected the probes will both keep working until 2030, at which point their transmitters and instruments will die and the craft will be left to shut down and simply float through space.

The spacecraft are the only human-made objects to operate beyond the heliosphere, the Sun's bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto.