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Transmission #03

major-tomMajor Tom wrote 04/15/2014 at 07:00 • 1 min read • Like

 Confirm launch site.
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Emerica wrote 04/17/2014 at 21:57 point
Someone was nice enough to get the pad prepared in sketch-up.
http://i.imgur.com/xLpZF5r.jpg

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richardginus wrote 04/17/2014 at 20:15 point
N 45.920, E 63.342 confirmed launch site

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Ground Control wrote 04/17/2014 at 17:42 point
Major Tom, this is Ground Control.
Launch site confirmed.

Await rescue mission at T-525600. Suit up!

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Emerica wrote 04/17/2014 at 17:51 point
Take your protein pills
and put your helmet on

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tehaxor69 wrote 04/17/2014 at 18:16 point
Good luck!

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Ted wrote 04/17/2014 at 19:38 point
Awesome! I assume this means next week for the next part?

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Ted wrote 04/17/2014 at 16:54 point
Got the email this morning. Audio in the 5 files says :

"Earth Farad"
"Joule Circuit"
"Amp Gain"
"Electron Capacitor"
"Dielectric Diode"

Taking the first letter as a number starting with A=0 we get the following numbers:

45 92 06 42 33

If we take these as longitude / latitude we get 45.920N, 64.233E. This gives us a location a bit east of Baikonur.

http://goo.gl/maps/ATuai

This seemed like an almost perfect result but I couldn't figure out why it wasn't actually on a specific location. So I wrote a script to generate every permutation of the numbers. I then plotted this on google maps using batchgeo.

http://batchgeo.com/map/06e0d8629bdc8f692655a99349f12f16

Checking through them now...

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Ted wrote 04/17/2014 at 17:29 point
Ok I've looked through the other coordinates, I don't think anything else makes sense. Is this it? Can someone confirm?

45.920N, 63.342E

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rawe wrote 04/17/2014 at 17:32 point
45.920N, 63.342E is the same order as the words/letters/numbers as in the audio files, except 4 (42 / EC) and 5 (33 / DD) are swapped. google maps name translates to "rocket site"

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tfx2 wrote 04/17/2014 at 17:32 point
I like that set of numbers. I think you might have found it.

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John Boyd wrote 04/17/2014 at 18:25 point
Sounds like thats it!

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erick.cedeno wrote 04/18/2014 at 15:49 point
We can only agree this is it.

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Kernelpanic wrote 04/16/2014 at 16:44 point
From rocket_hat and rawe1 on irc:
the text in mp3 1 and 2 are:
Transmission received at T-1090800.0222786265106846
Transmission received at T-1090800.0296872268554892
A difference of 0.007408600300550461s or 2221km (2221042.4944415614m)
Let's assume both recordings are of the same message and that 1.mp3 was received by Greenbank and 2.mp3 by Arecibo. Based on the pictures (The audible words are just noise picked up by one receiver and not the other.)
Overland the distance between Greenbank and Arecibo is 2568 km. This gives a possible launch site 173.5km south south east of Greenbank, but it is the middle of the woods in Virginia.

My thoughts. Other possible launch sites are at a distance of 173.5km/cost(Theta), where theta is the angle from the direct line between Greenbank and Arecibo. The bearing from Greenbank to Arecibo is 146°46′38″. So other possible launch sites could be:
distance: 73.5km/cos(Theta)
bearing: 146.7+Theta
Theta: -90 to +90 (actually not quite 90 to avoid the division by zero)

Later I would like to look at know launch sites and punch the data into the following site to see if anything matches up (most go do real work now)
http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

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Tyler Anderson wrote 04/17/2014 at 03:34 point
The absolute distance between Green Bank and Arecibo (along a straight line passing through the Earth) is 2553.8 km.

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Kernelpanic wrote 04/17/2014 at 05:37 point
Ground Control has provided cleaned up mp3 files. The words are now audible and the text in the origianl files is missing. Given these new files it would seem that the difference in receive times is a dead end and the spoken words in the mp3s are the important bit.

On the plus side I now have a python program that can calculate the distance between any two points on the planet.

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andyhull wrote 04/16/2014 at 07:10 point
Looks like the problem was quoting... various suggestions including...
<rocket_hat> openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in 1.bin -out 1.test.mp3 -pass pass:"Im floating in a most peculiar way"
... get us something "meaningful"... now we need to work out what the results actually mean.

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Rab wrote 04/16/2014 at 04:57 point
So I tried the bash script someone wrote for testing all the ciphers. It didn't work for me, but it gave me loads of errors. I was on windows so assumed this was just normal under cygwin for hours. In the end rocket_hat suggested I try it at the commandline manually. In the end this command worked and I got an mp3 file out of each image!

openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in nrao.aes -out 4-descrypted.mp3 -pass pass:I'm floating in a most peculiar way

Looks like it doesn't work quite the same on linux, someone figured out that windows is dropping the ' so it might work without. Give it a shot, the guys on the IRC channel are running with it, but I need to go to bed.

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andyhull wrote 04/15/2014 at 23:29 point
We have an astronaut, and some encrypted "stuff", we need a password/key (or keys) and the encryption algorithm... still searching...

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mikeneiderhauser wrote 04/15/2014 at 20:26 point
The above image contains a hidden image. https://imgur.com/a/vy6fO

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Kiltjim wrote 04/15/2014 at 22:52 point
What technique was used? Was it hidden using OpenPuff again?

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mikeneiderhauser wrote 04/15/2014 at 23:03 point
<emerica_> nah steg detect found the header, but no positive, so i read through looking for pNG

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daniel wrote 04/15/2014 at 19:35 point
Crazy, but the moon in the picture is half shaded and today we had a lunar eclipse.... who knows...

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Lambda42 wrote 04/15/2014 at 16:00 point
Oh and thanks SickSad for the map.

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SickSad wrote 04/15/2014 at 10:05 point
1 - green bank telescope
2 - arecibo observatory
3 - lofar telescope
4 - радиотелескоп ратан 600 (RATAN 600)
5 - Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope

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SickSad wrote 04/15/2014 at 10:17 point
Here's the locations for all the telescopes other than LOFAR which is an array of antennas at multiple locations around Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOFAR)

https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zl1GRRACGn8Y.kpF5eZnGOZ30

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tfx2 wrote 04/15/2014 at 12:45 point
Hmmm. So Green Bank and the specific LOFAR site from this picture set are the differences from the first set of radiotelescopes.

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SickSad wrote 04/15/2014 at 10:03 point
Here's an album of the 5 satellite dishes from the main site in case they get removed. http://imgur.com/a/fIjhp

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