The message that was transmitted from Mars had travelled for 16 minutes through space before being received by three observatories in the US and Italy.
A confusing alien-like signal was beamed from Mars in May last year. It featured an underlying message which was sent by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a spacecraft of the European Space Agency orbiting the Red Planet. The mysterious transmission was picked by three observatories in the US and Italy. The data was also shared with the general public via an online portal. Many citizen scientists and space enthusiasts took up the challenging task of cracking the message. They had to extract the signal first by using the raw data before decoding it.
A father-daughter duo from the US was the first team to decode the alien-like signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin had been working on the “A Sign in Space” project for more than a year. This exercise would help them determine whether humans were capable of making first contact with an alien civilisation.
According to the European Space Agency, Ken and Keli succeeded in decoding the transmission on October 22. While working on the project, the father-daughter team experimented with multiple ideas for thousands of hours. They put the signal into mathematical simulations on computers in an attempt to solve the cosmic puzzle.
The Chaffins found out that the message had some biological references. It looked like clusters of white pixels appearing on a black background. The signal had five configurations, referring to amino acids– the building blocks of life. “I knew I had the skills to decode the message,” said Ken Chaffin who has decades of experience in cellular automata.
The project designers have also admitted the biological connection, with the message in motion. Despite cracking the signal, Ken and Keli were unable to decode the inner meaning of it. The citizen scientists who discuss the topic with each other through a Discord channel have not put their focus on determining the meaning of the cryptic signal.