A father-daughter astronomy duo were left stunned to discover they decoded an “alien signal” from Mars after a year of tireless attempts at examining radio signals.
Ken and Keli Chaffin from the United States were just two of the 5,000 citizens who got involved with a multi-agency science programme to uncover a message sent by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).
The project, A Sign in Space, was the work of the ESA alongside the SETI Institute, the Green Bank Observatory, and the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).
The TGO is currently in orbit around Mars and sent a signal to Earth to simulate what it would be like if aliens tried the same thing.
Thousands of citizen scientists were required to help decode the message after three radio astronomy observatories intercepted it.
The raw data of the radio signal then needed to be extracted and decoded. Ken and Keli were the lucky pair who finally achieved this amazing accomplishment after a year of attempts.
They uncovered that the message, which arrived 10 days after transmission, was made up of five clusters of white dots and lattices against a black background. Amazingly, this suggests cellular formation and life.
Ken said of the discovery: “My decoded message is a simple image with five amino acids displayed in a universal (hopefully) organic molecular diagram notation and a few single pixel points that appear between the clusters and molecular diagrams.
“It’s absolutely obvious to me what this is, as well as to my chemist friend I ran this by. It is amazing to watch all of the CA gliders or spaceships carry the binary bits of the message all over the ‘galaxy’ and then suddenly come together in coherence and meaning.”
The message was created by Daniela de Paulis, artist in residence at the SETI Institute and Green Bank Observatory, with help from the ESA.
Now, the message must be interpreted to determine its meaning, and anyone can help with this endeavour by using the description and solution provided by Ken and Keli to independently analyse it and post the results on the project’s Discord channel.
Anyone who does this will need to describe how they got to their conclusion so their method can be replicated and verified to further our knowledge of interactions with alien life.
