Father-daughter team decode ‘alien signal’ from Mars that stunned world for year

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A father-daughter team has decoded a fake ‘alien’ message after a year of trying. Now, citizen scientists are trying to figure out what the decoded missive really means for Earth.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), Ken and Keli Chaffin of the US were the first to crack the code, which was sent from ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter as part of a citizen science project in May 2023. Three observatories radio stations on Earth heard the message, and the data was made available to the public. The first step was to extract the signal from the raw data, and the second was to decode it.

The message is part of “A sign in space,” a science/art project exploring how humanity might react after receiving an actual extraterrestrial message. It took just 10 days for an online community to extract the message from the raw data, but decoding it was more difficult: it wasn’t done until June 7, 2024, when the Chaffins messaged Daniela de Paulis, the project’s founder and artistic director, with the ESA solution publicly announcing its success. on October 22.

The message turned out to be an image depicting the structure of five amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. It was the brainchild of a group of “simulated aliens,” according to A Sign in Space, which included de Paulis, as well as a computer scientist, a poet, a radio engineer, a space physicist and lawyer, and several astronomers and astrobiologists. .

Related: The infamous “Wow! signal” that suggested aliens may actually be an exceptionally rare cosmic event

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The project received additional support from the SETI Institute—a nonprofit organization dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life—and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Decoding the message required many hours of computer simulations. The Chaffins were able to crack the code when they realized the message included some biological features, the ESA reported.

But what would aliens be trying to convey by sending an image of five amino acids? That mystery has yet to be solved. Now, citizen scientists are gathering on a Discord server to debate and puzzle over the meaning of the message. Do aliens come in peace? This question might be the hardest to answer.