How A Father-Daughter Duo Decoded ‘Alien’ Message From Mars

A father-daughter duo from the US decoded an ‘alien-like’ message transmitted through a signal by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft of the European Space Agency orbiting Mars, in May last year.

The message is a part of the “A Sign in Space” project aimed at engaging citizen scientists in decoding such signals.

As the European Space Agency spacecraft beamed a signal in May 2023, it was picked up by three observatories on the Earth, and the raw data was released online, giving scientists worldwide a chance to decipher the transmission, CNN reported.

Ken Chaffin and his daughter worked on this project to decode the message for nearly a year. They finally achieved success in June this year, the space agency announced on October 22.

While speaking with CNN, the two citizen scientists said they experimented with various ideas for thousands of hours and ran mathematical simulations on computers to decode the message.

Cosmic Puzzle

The decoded message appears to be clusters of white pixels with a black background. The visualised message has five configurations representing amino acids, the building blocks of life.

The ‘alien-like’ message is in motion and not static, only displaying arrangement for around one-tenth of a second. While the project designers have confirmed that amino acids are the intended message, they have left the interpretation open to all.

For now, the citizen scientists are working towards finding the meaning behind the cryptic puzzle. However, the community engaged in this is still unable to determine what the amino acids represent.

Mars to Earth

The ‘alien-like’ signal was transmitted from the Red planet to the Earth and travelled through space for 16 minutes before getting picked up by Northern California’s Allen Telescope Array, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope as well as the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna, Italy.

Later, the citizen scientists, who communicate with each other through a global Discord chat, went on to extract the raw data entangled with other data from the Mars spacecraft.

“I knew I had the skills to decode the message,” Ken Chaffin said, adding he holds decades of amateur experience working with cellular automata.