Remember the ‘alien’ signal sent by Mars orbiter? It’s just been decoded

Vishwam Sankaran
Wed 30 October 2024 


A simulated “alien” signal sent by a Nasa orbiter circling Mars has finally been cracked after months by a father-daughter duo, revealing the cosmic coded message.

Nasa collaborated with SETI Institute and media artist Daniela de Paulis on a project to simulate sending an alien message to Earth to observe how humans might interpret such an otherworldly code.

The “alien” message was developed with a small group of astronomers and computer scientists, with support from the European Space Agency.

The encoded message was beamed from Nasa’s ExoMars orbiter circling the Red Planet in May 2023, and the SETI Institute invited the public to decipher it.

Over several months, thousands of people attempted to decipher the alien code, sharing ideas on online forums.

The message consisted of cryptic white dots arranged in five clusters against a black background.

After running simulations “for hours and days on end”, a father-daughter duo Ken and Keli Chaffin have finally cracked the code – but what it conveys is still up for debate and discussion.

‘Alien’ signal decoded (Ken and Keli Chaffin via ESA)

They found that “blocks” interpreted from the signal have 1, 6, 7 or 8 “pixels” representing the atomic number of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

The duo successfully found that the “alien” message contained in the ExoMars signals symbolised amino acid molecules, which are protein building blocks.

They described the message as symbolising cell formation, the European Space Agency noted in a blog post.

“My decoded message is a simple image with 5 amino acids displayed in a universal (hopefully) organic molecular diagram notation and a few single pixel points that appear between the clusters and molecular diagrams,” the father wrote, sharing an image of his discovery.

Now that the message has been decoded, the project’s next step is to interpret it and determine what it was meant to convey – an interpretation that remains open.

“Could this sign of extraterrestrial intelligence be a recipe for destruction or a peaceful message? Are we ready for a first contact with an alien civilisation?” the ESA noted, adding that people can contribute their ideas online.

Participants are also required to include a description of the method they used to interpret the message so that it can be replicated and verified.