A simulated “alien signal” sent by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter a year ago was deciphered by a father-daughter duo in the United States, but it’s still unclear what the alien message meant.
After a year of effort, a father-daughter pair has successfully translated a fictitious “alien” communication. Citizen scientists are currently working to determine the true significance of the deciphered missive for Earth.
The code, which was provided by ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter as part of a citizen science initiative in May 2023, was cracked first by U.S. researchers Ken and Keli Chaffin, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The data were released to the public after the communication was received by three radio observatories on Earth. The signal was first extracted from the raw data and then decoded.
The message is essential for “A Sign in Space,” a science/craftsmanship project that investigates how mankind could respond after getting a genuine outsider message. It required just 10 days for an internet-based local area to remove the message from the crude information, yet it was more troublesome: That wasn’t accomplished until June 7, 2024, when the Chaffins informed Daniela de Paulis, the organizer and creative overseer of the undertaking, with the answer for unraveling it. ESA freely declared its prosperity on Oct. 22.
The message ended up being a picture portraying the construction of five amino acids, the structure blocks of proteins. It was the brainchild of a gathering of “reproduced extraterrestrials,” as per A Sign in Space, which included de Paulis, as well as a PC researcher, a writer, a radio specialist, a physicist, and a space legal counselor, and a few stargazers and astrobiologists.
The Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to the search for alien life, provided further assistance for the project. It took several hours of computer simulations to decode the message. When the Chaffins discovered that the message had certain biological elements, they were able to decipher the encryption, according to ESA.
But if aliens sent an image of five amino acids, what would they be attempting to say? We have yet to uncover that enigma. On a Discord channel, citizen scientists are now congregating to discuss and ponder the significance of the message. Are aliens peaceful? Perhaps the hardest question to answer is that one.