Message In a Bottle

About fifty years ago, NASA strapped a message in a bottle to the top of a rocket and flung it out into the deep dark. It wasn’t supposed to go this far, but it did. Long past its original job, it’s still out there—so far away now that a simple hello takes about a day to reach it, and another day to hear if it says hello back.

This old traveler has drifted beyond the warmth of the Sun’s protection, into the cold and quiet between stars. And yet, despite the distance, NASA’s engineers have kept in touch. Whispering across the void. Listening for whispers back.

But recently, something went wrong. A routine instruction—one of the countless they’ve sent—caused it to forget how to talk to us. Not because its antenna turned the wrong way, but because its mind, cobbled together from tech older than most of us, got scrambled. Like a scratched-up record that skips the important parts, it sent back gibberish we couldn’t make sense of.

For months, the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked…