A message has been sent to Earth from a spacecraft orbiting Mars, to simulate potential communication from an advanced alien civilisation.
On 24 May, a spacecraft at Mars, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), was used to send a coded message 鈥� just a few kilobytes in size 鈥� to our planet. Picked up by radio receivers on Earth, groups of astronomers and enthusiasts then set to work decoding it, a potential dry run for first contact.
鈥淭his kind of experiment is long overdue,鈥� says at the SETI Institute in California, who helped to coordinate the event. 鈥淲e have been searching for extraterrestrial signals for more than 60 years, but we never really thought about what receiving and decoding such a signal would be like.鈥�
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The project, called , was led by artist in Rome, who was put in touch with the European Space Agency (ESA) to use the TGO spacecraft. The goal was to assess how, if we ever picked up a radio signal from an alien civilisation, humans might respond. 鈥淗aving a Martian source makes the project immediately more relatable,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he source of the signal is truly in outer space.鈥�
It took 16 minutes for the transmission to get from Mars to Earth owing to the current distance of nearly 300 million kilometres between the two planets. The data was picked up by several radio telescopes on Earth, including the SETI Institute鈥檚 Allen Telescope Array in California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
Groups on Earth then set to work trying to decode the message, the contents of which were kept closely under wraps. Neill Sanders, from astronomy group in the UK, was one of those involved in trying to decipher the message. 鈥淚t鈥檚 fascinating,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t gives us a little sense of what would happen if we really did get a signal, everything from capturing the signal to processing the data.鈥�
The science mission of TGO, which studies the atmosphere of Mars from 400 kilometres above its surface, wasn鈥檛 affected by the project says at ESA鈥檚 European Space Operations Centre in Germany. 鈥淲e explored options on how this could be done without disturbing the spacecraft鈥檚 operations,鈥� he says.
Messages have been sent by humans into space before in attempts to make first contact, such as the Arecibo message in 1974 that was beamed to a nearby galaxy cluster. NASA鈥檚 twin Voyager spacecraft 鈥� both now beyond the solar system 鈥� also contain a 鈥済olden record鈥� with information about planet Earth. Despite the suspected billions of planets in our galaxy, however, we have never encountered a message coming the other way 鈥� until now.
The message has yet to be decoded, but when it has been, de Paulis hopes it will encourage discussion of what it might mean to make first contact. 鈥淗ow would we make sense of such a thing?鈥� she says. 鈥淭he project is really a way to highlight this very human philosophical process of making meaning around something.鈥�
