A signal beamed at Earth from Mars in 2023 has finally been decoded by a father and daughter team in the United States.
In 2023, a coded message was beamed at Earth from Mars. After over a year, this simulated extraterrestrial signal was finally decoded.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe beamed the signal at us in May 2023 as part of "A Sign in Space," a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project was intended as an experiment to test what types of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.
After over a year, a father-daughter team has decoded that signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after "following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end," according to an ESA statement.
Before the simulated alien signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. That took just 10 days, thanks to a group of some 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was the easy part.
Amino acids as depicted in a radio signal beamed to Earth in 2023 by ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
In 2023, a coded message was beamed at Earth from Mars. After over a year, this simulated extraterrestrial signal was finally decoded.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe beamed the signal at us in May 2023 as part of "A Sign in Space," a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. The project was intended as an experiment to test what types of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.
After over a year, a father-daughter team has decoded that signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after "following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end," according to an ESA statement.
Before the simulated alien signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. That took just 10 days, thanks to a group of some 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was the easy part.
Amino acids as depicted in a radio signal beamed to Earth in 2023 by ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
