Alien-like signal from 2023 has been decoded. The next step is to figure out what it means

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If Earth’s astronomical observatories were to pick up a signal from outer space, it would require an all-hands-on-deck effort to untangle and decipher the extraterrestrial message.

An art project from the SETI Institute, a nonprofit in Mountain View, California, devoted to searching for life beyond Earth, simulated that scenario over a year ago before a father-daughter team of citizen scientists recently deciphered the message. Its meaning, however, remains a mystery.

After the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency spacecraft orbiting Mars, beamed a signal containing an alien-like message in May 2023, three observatories on Earth picked it up and released the raw data on the internet, giving citizen scientists across the globe a chance to decipher the transmission.

Ken Chaffin and daughter Keli, who worked on decoding the message for nearly a year, uncovered the answer in June, the European Space Agency announced on October 22. Doing so required thousands of hours experimenting with various ideas and running mathematical simulations on a computer, the Chaffins told CNN.

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