'Dare mighty things': hidden message found on Nasa Mars rover parachute
Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars last week. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code.
Reddit users and social media posters on Twitter noticed that the red-and-white pattern on the parachute looked deliberate, and arrived at the result by using the red to represent the figure one, and the white to represent zero.
Each of the concentric rings in the parachute’s pattern represents one of the words. The zeroes and ones need to be split up into chunks of 10 characters, and from that, adding 64 gives you the computer ASCII code representing a letter. For example, seven white stripes, a red stripe and then two more white stripes represents 0000000100, the binary for four. Adding 64 to that gives 68, the ASCII code for the letter D. ...
The challenge had been set by Nasa itself. While the pattern has a scientific purpose – it allows mission control to see the angle the parachute has deployed at and whether it has got twisted – during a live stream discussing the landing, one Nasa commentator said: “Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work.” ...
The hi-tech fabric making up the parachute was created in Devon, emphasising the international nature of the effort to get Perseverance to the red planet. Heathcoat Fabrics of Tiverton said it was “very, very proud of the achievement”, with the director of the company’s woven fabric department, Peter Hill, saying it represented 15 years’ work. ...
