Father-Daughter Citizen Science Team Crack ‘Alien Signal’ From Mars

Amaze Lab

Last year Earth received a message from Mars. Now, after the messages were intercepted by three radio observatories on Earth, a father-daughter citizen scientist team has decoded it.

Transcript

00:00Last year, Earth received a message from Mars.

00:07That message was actually no mystery, as the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, or TGO, a satellite

00:12in orbit around the Red Planet and operated by the ESA, actually sent it.

00:16However, it was all in preparation of a real message from possibly real aliens.

00:21The whole thing is a part science, part art project, where citizen astronomers were tasked

00:25with decoding the message.

00:27Now after the messages were intercepted by three radio observatories on Earth, a father-daughter

00:31citizen science team has decoded it.

00:34Ken and Kelly Chafin were able to pull the scrambled code by determining that it was

00:37actually five bunches of dots and lines, eventually deciphering that the message was a coded example

00:43of the cellular formation of life.

00:45With Dad Ken writing in the solution, my decoded message is a simple image, with five amino

00:51acids displayed in a universal, hopefully, organic molecular diagram notation and a few

00:56single pixel points that appear between the clusters and molecular diagrams.

01:00And this is the screen cap of the solution, coded into the message for precisely one frame

01:05that lasts just one tenth of a second.

01:08The proctors of the challenge say this is just one part of the solution, with the next

01:11being the interpretation of what this message might mean.

Category

Transcript

Recommended