Father-daughter duo cracks coded ‘alien’ signal from Mars

More than a year ago we received a signal from Mars: a coded message from the European Mars orbiter, picked up by three observatories on Earth. The contents of this simulated alien message, crafted by an artist, remained a mystery for months. However, recently a father-daughter duo cracked the code, revealing the solution to the cosmic puzzle. Yet the true meaning of the message remains a matter of debate.

To prepare for a possible encounter with aliens, a collaborative project simulated an alien message to Earth to observe how we might interpret an alien code. After broadcasting a coded message from a Mars satellite, A Sign in Space, organized by the SETI Institute, invited the public to decipher it. The coded message was developed by artist Daniela de Paulis, the founder of the interplanetary art project. Thousands of people tried to decipher the alien code and exchanged ideas online about what it could mean.

In recognition of their highly creative and engaging project, the A Sign in Space team won the 2024 Science Fair Award from Gizmodo.

After a year of trying, Ken and Keli Chaffin have finally cracked the code. By running simulations, the father and daughter discovered that the message contained movement and that it symbolized cellular formation. They later discovered that it represented five amino acids, shown in a molecular diagram from the European Space Agency announced.

Amino acids are considered one of the most important building blocks of life on Earth, and perhaps elsewhere in the universe. In the encoded message they were presented by blocks with different numbers of pixels clustered together: one for hydrogen, six for carbon, seven for nitrogen and eight for oxygen. The signal also resembles the appearance of star clusters spread across the universe, or the cosmic networks that connect galaxies.

Now that the message has been revealed, A Sign in Space invites the audience to try to understand what it means. The content of the message is open to interpretation and remains open, and the team behind the project invites members of the public to join the conversation about what it means through the Disagreement server.

The artist behind the project, de Paulis, sought to inspire a conversation about human civilization and how we interpret our place in the cosmos. “We will have to give meaning to something that is completely outside the general nature of our own culture, and I was really fascinated by this possibility… how can we give meaning to something without parameters?” de Paulis told Gizmodo during a previous interview. “I am very fascinated by this process, how society tries to give meaning to reality.”

While the transmission wasn’t actually from aliens, it does highlight how challenging communication between two alien worlds is likely to be, suggesting that detecting a signal from another planet may not be the most challenging part of making it first contact.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a mission launched in 2016 to study the Martian atmosphere, was used to broadcast the message on May 24, 2023which was picked up 16 minutes later by three observatories on Earth. The European Space Agency’s mission control center sent the secret message to the spacecraft, where it was stored in its memory. The ExoMars orbiter then converted the message into telemetry (or digital data) and beamed it back to Earth as radio waves.

Astronomers from the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Allen Telescope Array in California and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in Italy who received the signal, deleted the telemetry and posted the message on the project’s website for anyone to download.

The message itself is a few kilobytes in size, but its contents were known only to De Paulis and two others. A week after receiving the signal on Earth, 400,000 people had downloaded it in an attempt to decipher the code, each with their own interpretation of the alien signal. The effort to understand aliens, and ourselves, is not over.