The alien-hunting team at SETI has a new test for humanity to decipher messages sent from an alien race

• SETI sent a message from Mars to Earth to simulate how aliens' attempts at communication may play out.
• The mysterious message is posted online for anyone to study and attempt to decode.

On May 24, a message from another planet reached Earth.

It was picked up by three observatories, but no one knows what the message says, yet. And that's the point.

This is a test conducted by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute to determine how well humanity could decipher a real message sent by aliens.

SETI began operations in 1985 to help discover intelligent life beyond Earth. It hasn't achieved its primary objective yet, but SETI has kept busy over the decades.

One of its latest projects called 'A Sign in Space' sent a mysterious radio signal from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a European Space Agency craft orbiting Mars.

The signal took 16 minutes to reach Earth where it was detected by participating astronomers at the Allen Telescope Array in California, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Medicina Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna, Italy.

The astronomers then posted the data on the project's website.

The message is available to anyone who wants to take a crack at decoding it. But it won't be easy.

Daniela de Paulis, the project's lead artist, told Wired that she expects it will take several weeks or even months for someone to decipher the message, which consists of a binary file — a stream of ones and zeroes.

De Paulis and SETI aren't giving any clues away just yet. The message could be an image, video, music, or something entirely different, Wired reported. And that's part of the challenge.

But it seems that at least one group is fast-tracking their way to solving the mysterious message.

Neill Sanders from Go Stargazing, a British amateur astronomy group, told CNN that he and his team have already started to disentangle the data.

"The hidden message within the transmission has been obtained. However, the challenge now is to make sure what has been obtained is accurate," Sanders told CNN.

Sanders is just one among thousands of people worldwide trying to crack the code. You can see an open discussion of people's ideas and theories on a Discord channel.

At the end of the day, there's no telling what a real message from aliens may look like. But de Paulis told Wired that "if we ever received an extraterrestrial signal, scientists won't know where the noise ends and where the actual message begins. So this is quite faithful to what would happen if the scientific community decided to share the signal in an open-source format."

SETI is holding a series of workshops through June 14 to discuss the project and explain how we'd communicate with aliens if they ever were to ring our doorbell.