NASA has been searching for any evidence of living organisms that lived or are currently living on Mars for decades. Now, they have just received a new signal that might change everything. The Red Planet is the only one with Earth-like characteristics, such as rocky structures, weather, and environmental predictability – and it doesn’t crush anything that lands on the surface, like Venus does. Multiple rovers were sent to the planet to search and study the soil before astronauts get there, and even though the remote robots collected evidence, those can’t be retrieved in a mission due to the lack of fuel.
Why can’t NASA explore Mars using real astronauts?
In order to go to Mars, NASA has sent rovers one at a time, with years of space between one mission and the next. With the current technology and understanding, a trip from Earth all the way to the Red Planet takes two months, and it’s only a one-way ticket. Every rover on the nearest planet was sent there to stay forever, but the most recent one, the Perseverance, has open slots inside its structure to collect pieces from the soil for further research and study.
Today, if an astronaut were to have the chance to land on Mars, they wouldn’t be able to come back, as the fuel to make the trip is only enough for the spaceship to go there, not back. There’s also the landing technology that SpaceX has been developing and has had success with for a while, but explosions are still a danger.
New message coming from the Red Planet: Something is talking to us
In 2023, a strange signal was sent from Mars back to Earth. For more than a year, nobody knew what it meant—until now. The European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter sent the transmission in May 2023 as part of A Sign in Space, an art project led by Daniela de Paulis, who works with the SETI Institute in California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
The idea was simple: test how we might deal with a real alien signal if one ever reached us. At first, more than 5,000 volunteers helped clean the raw radio data. That step only took ten days. The hard part came later. A father-and-daughter team, Ken and Keli Chaffin, spent months running tests, making guesses, and pushing through dead ends. After countless hours, they finally cracked it.
They cracked the message: The meaning is still unknown
The decoded message from Mars wasn’t a clear sentence or picture—it showed patterns that looked like movement. To the Chaffins. What it means is still up for discussion. When the signal was finally visualized, it looked like clusters of white dots flashing against a black screen. For just a split second, five shapes appeared—each one matching the structure of amino acids, the basic ingredients of life that are associated with DNA.
The DNA carries instructions through a chain of nucleotides. Those instructions are first copied into mRNA, which is then used to build a protein—made up of amino acids arranged in a specific order. The message kept shifting, showing the pattern for only a tenth of a second at a time – much shorter than the previous “signal” Earth received.
The project is focused on finding life outside Earth: Anyone can help
NASA has collaborative initiatives open to the public to help not only search for life outside Earth, but also find other cosmic objects in the cosmos that might have gone unnoticed by their team. The space agency allows people to search the cosmos with the best researchers in the world – and some of the most recent discoveries came from this project.