I have a hypothesis, and a testable one. It doesn't even require that much tin-foil. But what it does require is eye-balls, lots of them, or a lot of man-hours. And I really, really can't do it alone. Or I can, but it would be painful and totally defeat the purpose of playing a game.
That all said, if anyone is willing to help with this, I would greatly appreciate it.
I'm going to assume that the UP is trying to tell us something as simply as it can. Because it always points to Merope 5c, and because psychologically, creatures look at the things they want (any dog owners out there willing to contest this point?) I think the UP not only wants us to find something on the surface, it wants us to take it there. Remember that newsletter hint in green that it was the 'key'? I'm taking that literally. There is something down there that only the presence of a UP will activate or unlock.
So the UP, it doesn't know how humans communicate, because if it did it would do so. It doesn't know our language, our means of measuring co-ordinates, our number systems. So anything it does tell us needs to be independent of that. Which brings me to the circle. There's stuff going on around the circle, which may or may not be important. (It probably is important, but it may not be critical.) I can take wild stabs at things, but it's all guesswork on my part. What isn't guesswork, however, is the circle itself and the lines on it. These are things we can measure in whatever system we care to do it in, and from any orientation we take the message to be displayed in.
First lets consider the two normal lines. The way they are displayed, these seem to me to mark a distance along the circle. If the circle were to correspond to Merope 5c, that would give a distance along its surface from some landmark.
The second line, a radius, marks an angle. The faint grid overlaying the circle suggesting that it's actually a sphere even helpfully includes a pair of prominent, intersecting lines to help us measure the angle. And while we don't know which one to measure from, we just need one and then it's trivial to scale the measurement to any another as necessary.
Two pieces of information, that's all we need to specify a point on the surface, so long as we have a coordinate system. I'm guessing that what the symbols surrounding the circle are all about, but I still can't make heads or tails of them. So lets instead come up with the simplest coordinate system we can. Since the planet rotates along one axis, let's use Merope 5c's poles as one point of reference. This naturally leads to a system of latitude. For longitude, we need to arrive at a consensus for some arbitrary line to serve as our starting line. There is one huge crater on Merope 5c, we could run the line through that. But the crater is large, and do we choose the middle, or one edge, or what? Merope 5c is tidally locked to Merope 5, so the projection of the line where Merope 5 is directly overhead could also serve as a meridian. If I were a UP, I'd consider the line marked by Merope 5 a better candidate, for the simple reason that as unlikely as it may be, in principle a big space rock could come crashing down on Merope 5c and wipe away my landmark. (That said, if using Merope 5 turns up nothing, we can always revisit this assumption.)
Since the angle marked by the two normals seems to indicate a distance, this naturally better corresponds to latitude, as longitude lines are spaced more closer together the nearer they are to one of the poles. And since measuring anything using the UP's message is somewhat inexact, there will be a small error value associated with the measurement. My best efforts give me:
Lat0 = 27.5 +/- 2.0 degrees.
The radius line I measured against the nearest axis line giving the wider angle, giving me:
Long0 = 50.0 +/- 1.0 degrees.
I took some stabs at the Merope 5 meridian, but MadDogMurdock has already
christened it the Murdock Meridian, so I figured I'd average his measurements and use that:
MM = -117.3 +/- 0.5 degrees
Unfortunately we don't know what direction from the meridian to travel from, which axis to measure the angle from, or which pole to take the latitude from. Again, the symbols surrounding the circle may greatly help narrow things down here. Also, the errors involved necessarily transform checking out one lat/long co-ordinate pair into searching a large area. But perhaps Frontier designed this whole endeavour to be a group effort on our part. In which case, with enough people, we can simply check all the options. Using the above numbers, I get the following search areas:
Zone 01. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: -65.8 to -68.8 degrees
Zone 02. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: 26.2 to 29.3 degrees
Zone 03. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: 111.2 to 114.2 degrees
Zone 04. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: -155.8 to -158.8 degrees
Zone 05. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: -165.8 to -168.8 degrees
Zone 06. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: 101.2 to 104.2 degrees
Zone 07. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: 11.2 to 14.2 degrees
Zone 08. Lat: 60.5 to 64.5 degrees, Long: -75.8 to -78.8 degrees
Zone 09. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: -65.8 to -68.8 degrees
Zone 10. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: 26.2 to 29.3 degrees
Zone 11. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: 111.2 to 114.2 degrees
Zone 12. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: -155.8 to -158.8 degrees
Zone 13. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: -165.8 to -168.8 degrees
Zone 14. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: 101.2 to 104.2 degrees
Zone 15. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: 11.2 to 14.2 degrees
Zone 16. Lat: -60.5 to -64.5 degrees, Long: -75.8 to -78.8 degrees
While this is a lot of ground to cover, on the plus side it is also a lot less than the entirety of the surface of Merope 5c! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Any suggestions or observations, doubly so.