'Alien signal' beamed at Earth from Mars finally decoded after an entire year

In May 2023, an "alien signal" was beamed at Earth from Mars, and it contained a coded message that has now been finally deciphered.

The "alien signal" was beamed at Earth by the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe as part of a partnership between the ESA and 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 is an art piece called "A Sign in Space," but it has real experimental value as its been used to test how long it would take for a real alien signal detected on Earth to be deciphered.

After more than a year of deciphering, father and daughter team Ken and Keli Chaffin have decoded the message, and according to a statement from the ESA, the team was able to decode the signal by following their "intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end." Before the signal could be decoded, it needed to be extracted from the raw radio signal data, which took 10 days and a group of more than 5,000 citizen scientists.

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The ESA explained in its statement the father and daughter team realized the signal "contained movement," leading them to speculate the signal could contain information about the cellular nature of life. The message contained images of five amino acids, and now the challenge begins as to what the images mean.

The goal of the artistic experiment was to rehearse the event of an alien signal being detected on Earth.

"A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines."