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It's navigational information – distances and directions to local pulsars. The starburst thing – bottom, left – was a total mystery to me. Drake resolved that one quickly enough: a stylus is provided with each spacecraft. How is an alien Kerbal supposed to know what a record stylus is? Dr. What was obviously a record stylus had suggested nothing to me. Frank Drake to explain what the hieroglyphics meant. Unfortunately, I had gotten about this far when someone asked Dr. It seemed sensible that the key to the timing was on the record cover, but I was having a hard time working it out. That number works out to 11,845,632 in decimal, so I knew that the time interval had to be very, very short. I guessed that the 101101001100000000000000 under the waveform was telling me how long it would take for the audio to play one 'trace' (a single stripe of pixels), but I had no clue what the units on that number were. The waveform at the top suggests that the audio would somehow be broken down into pixel values, though I had no guess as to how this would work until I started poking at the data. When converted to decimal, this value is 512, so I knew I'd be seeing images with 512 columns. First, the scan-line image starts with the 1, 10, 11 enumeration and continues to 100000000. I can't say that I was 100% certain of how the encoding worked, but I was crystallizing a few guesses. The next twenty minutes pretty much doomed the next two weeks of my spare time. The repeated instances of |, |-, || also suggested to me that these were enumerations in binary (1, 10, 11.) The puzzle began to drag me in, and I continued to work through it, trying to track the talk while getting my puzzle geek on. They suggested the scan lines of a television or computer screen. I have a background in computer graphics, so the zig-zag lines in the rectangle, just to the right of the hole, were recognizable to me. It's an iconic image, familiar to most space exploration enthusiasts, but I'd never taken the time to really study it. During the talk, an image of the record's cover was displayed behind David and his guests, Timothy Ferris and Frank Drake, the producer and technical director, respectively, of the Voyager Record in 1977: He had and his Ozma Records partner Tim Daly organized a panel at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, covering the design and production of the Voyager Golden Record, as well as the upcoming public release of a vinyl edition that they produced. It was something of an accident that I recently met David Pescovitz. I tried to keep the conversation high-level enough to be broadly accessible, but still give enough detail that an interested masochist could reproduce (and, hopefully, improve upon) my results. How does one pack data into audio? (Remember modems?) This article doesn't answer that question directly, but it does attempt to reproduce the efforts an alien would go through to recover those images.

The video above is a decoding of more than 100 images that were packed into the audio channels of a record that was placed on each of the Voyager spacecraft. How I decoded the images on the Voyager Golden Record Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.

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A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo.

While flipping through an electronics catalog, Valentin Boriakoff, Drake's colleague at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, stumbled upon Colorado Video, a small television equipment firm in Boulder that had built a unique device for encoding television images as audio signals that could be transmitted over telephone lines. The challenge was finding technology capable of the task. Technical director Frank Drake had always planned to encode the photos in the audio spectrum for the record. Attached to each spacecraft is a Golden Record containing Earth's greatest music, spoken greetings, 'Sounds of Earth,' and more than 100 images encoded as audio signals, a technological feat at the time. Editor's note: Forty years ago today, NASA launched Voyager 1, the second of two spacecraft on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space.