Description

Decode this message from the moon.

• Category: Forensics
• Points: 250

Hints

• How did pictures from the moon landing get sent back to Earth?

• What is the CMU mascot?, that might help select a RX option

Solution

• You need to download an audio file which has weird sounds. That I don’t understand. The hints helped me here, to get to a starting point for my research.

• SSTV signals are used by Apollo 7, 8, 9 and 11 space missions to send images from the space to earth. This is interesting. Cause I always taught to space communication works.

• What is SSTV?

Slow-scan television (SSTV): Slow-scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.

• I found a SSTV decoder on github that seems to work for me. Link: https://github.com/colaclanth/sstv.

• Flag: picoCTF{beep_boop_im_in_space}

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I hope you have learned something valuable. If you like this post please share it with your fellow hacker mates and if you have any questions & or suggestions please feel free to post them down in the comments. I’d love to hear and learn from you.

Have a great day guys 👋. See you in the next post.

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