The diagram shows the analysis of the atmosphere of Mars. Source: European Space Agency
It will be some time before the first human settlers send messages from Mars. But a coded message from Mars kept the entire community busy for months last year.
The message began in May 2023, when the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter sent an encrypted message from Mars. In fact, its main mission is to find out if there is life on Mars.
Signal: Part of an interdisciplinary art projectwhere a spaceship takes on the role of aliens and sends an encrypted message to Earth.
Three radio astronomy observatories received the data on Earth. The first challenge was to extract the signal from the raw data.
More than 5,000 scientists and interested parties participated in this process. After just ten days, the message was filtered from the raw data block.
The message took much longer to decrypt. American father-daughter duo Ken and Kelly Chaffin were able to decode it a year later using simulation:
Image of the decrypted message. Source: European Space Agency
At first glance, the decoded image appears to be white dots arranged in five groups on a black image. It soon became clear that these were amino acids, the main components of all life.
In the message Ken Chaffin goes into more detail for organizers. This is how he created a message decoding simulator in the Unity game engine. Thus, the team was able to decrypt the encrypted message in 6,625 steps. He describes his impression of the result as follows:
It's amazing to watch how […] The binary bits of the message through all galaxy
They are carried and then suddenly come together to form a cohesive and meaningful whole.
On the site Log in to space You can understand the whole process. The first entry is from May 25, 2023, and the last is from June 12, 2024, the day the message was decrypted.
What do you think of the project? Is this something you can be excited about? Feel free to write us a comment.
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