1 June - The A Sign in Space Message

June 2, 2023 July 6, 2023 Daniel Estévez

After carefully documenting all their work, a team of participants announce their very compelling message candidate. This is the data that was transmitted from TGO using memory dump commands.

Link to the A Sign in Space Message: https://github.com/BatchDrake/ASignInSpace/blob/master/Candidates/artifacts/data17.bin

Link: https://discordapp.com/channels/1066055437457297469/1110258624950968421/1113643107632828438

The organizers acknowledge that this is indeed the message that was delivered to ESA to be transmitted by TGO. The stage of decoding the message now ends, and the interpretation of the meaning of the message begins. The organizers congratulate all the participants for the impressive group work that has led to this stage in only 6 days.

Link: https://discordapp.com/channels/1066055437457297469/1110258624950968421/1113730280839196702

The discussion about how to represent and interpret the message now continues.

The message is 8212 bytes long. The way in which most participants are splitting the message is as a small 10 byte piece, followed by a large 8192 byte piece, and finally another 10 byte piece. Some days ago, people had observed that the 8192 byte piece has 65536 bits, which can be laid as a 256 x 256 image. On this image, most of the bits are zeros, but a few of them are ones, arranged in small clouds of dots with a few 2x2 squares. This is what is now commonly known as the starmap. Some people are trying to match it to different clusters of stars, constellations, galaxies, or other asterisms. Maybe Stephan's quintet?

Link: https://discordapp.com/channels/1066055437457297469/1111404329694400542/1113913737217314919

At the moment no one is sure about what to do with each of the two small 10 byte pieces at the beginning and the end of the message. Maybe the message should not be divided in this way, after all. Still, there is an ongoing discussion about patterns in the first 10 bytes of the message.
Apparently this data has some interesting numerical properties.