Parkville Puzzle 13 - Jupiter Rising Mystery Cache

This puzzle is a member of the Map of Victoria GeoArt. It has been placed to coincide with the Parkville Mega.

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched by NASA on September 5th, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. The Voyager 1 probe has successfully operated for over 40 years, and the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and return data. Voyager 1's extended mission is expected to continue until around 2025 when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments. At a distance of 141 AU (2.11×10¹⁰ km), approximately 21 billion kilometers (13 billion miles) from the Sun as of January 2, 2018, it is the farthest spacecraft and man-made object from Earth.

One of the many objectives of the Voyager spacecraft mission was a flyby of Jupiter. During the flyby many discoveries were made including that of Jupiter’s ring system, new satellites orbiting the planet, the massive volcanic eruptions on the moon Io and the high possibility that Europa may have a liquid water interior.

Voyager 1 began photographing Jupiter in January 1979 and made its closest approach on March 5, 1979, at a distance of approximately 349,000 km from Jupiter. The short duration of the flyby meant most of the best observations were made in a 48 hour period. It was during this period that something unusual occurred – all communications with the spacecraft were lost for exactly 17 minutes 11.18 seconds. All was thought to have been lost when suddenly communications returned and it’s been smooth sailing for Voyager 1 ever since.

Even more interestingly, approximately 40 minutes after communications returned, a signal of unknown origin was received at the Tidbinbilla tracking station at approximately 1:00pm UT. It seemed as though the signal had been transmitted using the Voyager 1 communication systems and directed to that particular tracking station. Technicians decoded the signal and the result was a number of strings of hexadecimal code. Try as they might, the technicians made no further progress in making sense of the message but some suggested it may hint to a location where evidence could be found of visitors from another world.

The Puzzle