A father-daughter team from the US has successfully decoded a mock “alien signal” beamed from ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter last May, but the meaning behind it remains unknown.
The European Space Agency (ESA) created a citizen science project called “A Sign in Space,” which simulated an extraterrestrial message. The team extracted the signal from raw data and decoded it after 10 days of community involvement. However, decoding it took much longer – until June 7, when Ken and Keli Chaffin shared their solution with the founder and artistic director of the project, Daniela de Paulis.
The decoded message depicted the structure of five amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. A team of “simulated extraterrestrials” created this image as part of the project, which also included computer scientists, poets, radio engineers, physicists, space lawyers, astronomers, and astrobiologists. The SETI Institute and the Green Bank Observatory supported the project.
Despite decoding the message, scientists still cannot understand its purpose – did aliens send it to convey peace or something else? Citizen scientists are now discussing the meaning behind the signal on a Discord server.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/father-daughter-team-decodes-alien-signal-from-mars-that-stumped-the-world-for-a-year