An ambitious latest SETI (seek for extraterrestrial intelligence) test is underway.
At 3 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) today (May 24), Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe beamed a coded message toward Earth. Sixteen minutes later, it was received by three big radio telescopes on Earth, kicking off a world effort to decipher the cryptic signal.
That effort is A Register Space, a multiweek project led by Daniela de Paulis, the present artist in residence on the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
“Throughout history, humanity has looked for meaning in powerful and transformative phenomena,” de Paulis said in an announcement.
“Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization could be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind,” she added. “A Register Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended seek for meaning across all cultures and disciplines.”
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The Green Bank Observatory is one in every of the three scopes that listened for the Trace Gas Orbiter’s signal today, together with the SETI Institute’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station in northern Italy, which is managed by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.
Researchers at each of those facilities will now process the signal and make it available to their colleagues all over the world and to the general public at large. The project team wants folks from a spread of backgrounds to review the signal and check out their hand at deciphering it.
“This experiment is a possibility for the world to find out how the SETI community, in all its diversity, will work together to receive, process, analyze and understand the meaning of a possible extraterrestrial signal,” Wael Farah, project scientist for the ATA, said in the identical statement.
“Greater than astronomy, communicating with E.T. would require a breadth of data,” Farah said. “With A Register Space, we hope to make the initial steps towards bringing a community together to fulfill this challenge.”
You possibly can learn more, and submit your individual ideas in regards to the message, via the project’s website.
You possibly can take part in A Register Space in other ways as well.
For instance, over the following six to eight weeks, the project team will host a series of Zoom meetings that can deal with the societal implications of detecting a “technosigature” from advanced alien life, amongst other topics.
You possibly can learn more about these workshops, and register to attend them, here.