Preparing for First Contact: Scientists Test Alien Signal from Mars.

A transmission designed to mimic correspondence from an extraterrestrial civilization made its way to Earth from Mars, organized by SETI, a nonprofit organization with a mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The message, which is only a few kilobytes in size, had to be disentangled from the rest of the raw data received during the transmission, which might have included background noise, telemetry data and spurious information. The event also served as a general rehearsal of all the steps involved in identifying and correctly processing a signal of extraterrestrial and intelligent origin.