Father and daughter decipher mysterious “Martian signal” after 1.5 years of attempts by hundreds of scientists to solve the mystery
Kyiv • UNN
Americans Ken and Kelly Chaffin decoded a simulated signal from Mars orbit that 500 experts could not decipher. The message contained an image with five groups of dots resembling organic molecules.
After more than a year, none of the team of 500 specialists could solve the mystery of the message, which was received from a distance of 225 million kilometers by the Green Bank Observatory radio telescope. Recently, however, two American citizens managed to crack the code, detecting an “alien signal” from Mars.
Writes UNN with reference to Science Alert.
The signal of the simulated extraterrestrial broadcast was received from Mars orbit using the Exomars Trace orbiter. As part of the Sign in Space project, about 500 scientists participated in its decoding. Only after almost a year and a half, two US residents managed to “crack” the code and decipher the message.
Father and daughter Ken and Kelly Chaffin found out that the decrypted message contained an image with five groups of white dots and grids on a black background, reminiscent of cell formation and life.
They sent what they had created to the author of the Sign in Space initiative, Daniele de Paulis. Enthusiasts assume that this is a drawing depicting complex organic molecules. Perhaps it is amino acids - organic compounds that serve as building blocks for protein and are part of all tissues of the human body.
The decoded message is a simple image with five amino acids represented in a (hopefully) universal organic molecular diagram
Now experts have speculated that the “extraterrestrial” message is an attempt to get to know the biology of the planet.
For reference
The simulated signal was sent in May 2023 from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which was located approximately 225 million kilometers from Earth.
After the capture of three radio astronomy observatories, the process of decoding the signal began.
“We used a 2×2 reversible Margolus cellular automaton (BCA) with the simplest reversal rule called 'singular point rotation (CCW),'” explained the senior Chaffin.
It acts only on 2×2 cells containing a single point or pixel, keeping the number of pixels at 625 input and 625 output. The asterisk-like image has molecular shapes encoded in a set of three-dimensional local basis vectors of degrees of freedom (also shown in the header)
Then, according to the scientist, “the automation of the CA performs the transformation and projects this 3D information onto a 2D plane.
I can run my simulator based on the Unity game engine forward (counterclockwise rotation) and backward (clockwise rotation) in time and convert star map images to amino acid diagrams over 6,625 generations, and reverse the rotation process to convert amino acid diagrams back to star map images over 6,625 generations,” the scientist wrote.
