It could be the longest commercial break in history. Over a six-hour period this morning, high-powered radars in the Arctic Circle broadcast an advertisement into space for the first time.

The advertisement, for Doritos tortilla chips, was being directed towards a solar system in the Ursa Major constellation, just 42 light years from Earth. The solar system contains a habitable zone, and could host an Earth-like planet and extraterrestrial life.

The EISCAT European space station on the Norwegian island of Svalbard sent the message using its array of radars. Those radars are normally used to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

“They are among the brightest signals coming off our planet – almost like a lighthouse beaming out of the solar system,” says Tony van Eyken, EISCAT director. That makes the radars ideal for transmissions far into space, he says.


The advert itself is unlikely to be decoded by extraterrestrial life, according to van Eyken. “We’re sending it as an MPEG file coded into 1s and 0s. It’s going to look pretty random,” he says. But repeating the message in a series of regular pulses over several hours should help extraterrestrials identify the message as intelligent, he thinks.

EISCAT will receive an undisclosed donation from Doritos for the use of their facilities. “It’s not big money, but it could be the thin end of the wedge to using our resources in a new way,” says van Eyken.

In 2007, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced it was ending funding for a number of astronomy projects, and will no longer fund UK researchers hoping to work at EISCAT.

“Some years in the future, the money that comes from this kind of commercial service could be used to fund pure research,” says van Eyken.

Residents of the UK can view the Doritos advert, entitled “Tribe”, on ITV1 at 7:44 pm on Sunday, 15 June.