Father-daughter duo decipher message coming from Mars
Ken and Keli Chaffin, a father-daughter team from the US, decrypted a simulated "extraterrestrial" communication delivered from Mars in May 2023 via the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
The communication was caught by three Earth observatories as part of "A Sign in Space," an artistic endeavor that engaged citizen scientists in extraterrestrial message decoding.
The Chaffins noticed that the message comprised a graphic of five amino acids, life's building components. European Space Agency experts say the Chaffins did simulations for "days on end" before finding the solution.
Combining computer simulations with reversible cellular automata, they "followed their intuition and conducted hours-long simulations every day," organizing the bits into coherent structures.
In May 2023, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter sent a simulated signal to Earth, which arrived 16 minutes later. The signal was extracted in ten days by over 5,000 citizen scientists worldwide.
This group of amateur scientists extracted the encrypted message from the raw radio signal in the initial phase, demonstrating global collaboration in the case of extraterrestrial contact.
Since amino acids are life's building elements, their appearance in the message raises many questions: What do the five biological components represent? Are amino acid implications a message about life?
The European Space Agency's "A Sign in Space" initiative found that citizen scientists could help understand extraterrestrial signals. Over 5,000 amateur scientists helped extract the message, and the Chaffins decoded it, showing the potential of collaboration and diversity in solving hard issues.
While the Chaffins' study has illuminated the message's content, the search for its meaning starts. This simulated extraterrestrial communication's meaning is still debated, and the initiative engages the global community in its interpretation.