Father and daughter shocked as they decode 'alien signal' from Mars | World

A father-daughter astronomy duo were stunned to discover they had decoded an ‘alien signal’ from Mars after a year of tireless efforts to investigate radio signals.

Ken and Keli Chaffin of the United States were just two of 5,000 citizens who became involved in a multi-agency scientific program to retrieve a message sent by the European Space Agency’s Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) ( ESA).

The project, A Sign in Space, was the work of ESA together with the SETI Institute, the Green Bank Observatory and the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).

The TGO is currently in orbit around Mars and has sent a signal to Earth to simulate what it would be like if aliens attempted the same thing.

Thousands of citizen scientists had to help decipher the message after three radio astronomy observatories intercepted it.

Next, the raw data from the radio signal had to be extracted and decoded. Ken and Keli were the lucky couple who finally achieved this amazing feat after a year of trying.

They found that the message, which arrived ten days after being sent, consisted of five clusters of white dots and grids 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 universal (hopefully) organic molecular diagram notation and a few individual pixel points appearing between the clusters and molecular diagrams.

“It is absolutely clear to me what this is, as it is to my chemist friend to whom I passed this on. It is amazing to see all the CA gliders or spaceships carrying the binary pieces of the message throughout 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 by using Ken and Keli’s description and solution to analyze it independently and post the results on the website.His project’s Discord channel.

Anyone who does this will be required to describe how they came to their conclusion so that their method can be replicated and verified to advance our knowledge of interactions with extraterrestrial life.