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On May 23, 2010, as it was hurtling toward the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space, the Voyager 2 space probe, having traveled 10 billion miles (16 billion kilometers) over 33 years, suffered a strange malfunction.

Or, at least it seemed to be a malfunction at first. Voyager 2’s flight data system, responsible for formatting the probe’s data so that it can be sent back to Earth, started transmitting back data in a language the scientists couldn’t recognize. According to NASA planetary scientist Kevin Baines, it was “just about 10 billion miles away from the Earth and all of the sudden it starts sending data in the language we don’t understand.

"It can be called as an alien language.”
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In The Martian, fictional astronaut and consummate wiseacre Mark Watney survives being stranded on the red planet by growing potatoes in the Martian soil, extending his usual rations well past their expected usefulness. But in the real world, there have been concerns over using Mars’s soil to grow food, due to there being a great deal more heavy elements found in it, as compared to what’s found in typical Earth dirt. However, a new study from the Netherlands appears to show that Watney may have been on to something.
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