Alien Signal: In 2023, a coded message was sent from Mars to Earth

Science: In 2023, a coded message was sent from Mars to Earth. After more than a year, this simulated extraterrestrial signal has finally been decoded. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe sent the signal at us in May 2023 as part of “A Sign in Space,” a multi-week art project led by Daniela De Paolis, current artist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project was intended to test what kinds of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.

More than a year later, a father-daughter team has decoded that signal. According to a statement from ESA, Ken and Kelly Chaffin were able to decipher the message after “following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days.” Before the fake alien signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. This took just 10 days, thanks to a group of about 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was far from easy work.

It took Chaffins more than a year to decode the signal. He eventually found that it “has motion,” ESA wrote in the statement, which led him to think it might contain information about cellular formation or life. But decoding the signal doesn’t mean it can be understood. Now that the secret message has been decoded, citizen scientists like Chaffins will have to start trying to interpret its contents and find possible meaning in it.