We decoded NASA’s messages to aliens by hand

In 1977, twin golden records were sent into space on the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. Still sailing through space at nearly 60,000 km per hour, the records contain sound, songs, and images from earth. But how did NASA include images on an analog record? Here, we decoded the audio, and see the images the way that aliens were intended to see them.

Video by: Cory Zapatka, William Poor, Sophie Erickson
Graphics: Alex Parkin
Audio: Andrew Marino
Executive Producers: Nilay Patel, Eleanor Donovan
Director of Audience Development: Ruben Salvadori
Social Media Manager: Dilpreet Kainth
General Manager: Stephen Belser
Network Development: Sarah Bishop Woods
Thanks to: Alessandra Potenza, Ron Barry

Special thanks to Ron Barry for walking us through his own audio decoding process, which got us excited in the story over a year ago. You can read about his own adventure and watch his process produce results in real-time in his own video in the links below:
https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html
https://www.ruclip.tv/video/ibByF9XPAPg

Link to Manuel’s code on GitHub:
https://github.com/aizquier/voyagerimb

Link to the full audio data:
https://soundcloud.com/user-482195982/voyager-golden-record-encoded-images

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Source: https://youtu.be/RRuovINxpPc