The video shows the colorful orange and white parachute above the rover that helped slow the spacecraft’s descent.
“You may notice the pattern on the parachute here,” Allen Chen, the rover’s take-off, descent and landing leader, said Monday. “Clear patterns are useful in helping us determine the clock orientation of the parachute. Also, the contrasting sections can be helpful in tracking different parts of the parachute as it inflates.
“In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope that our efforts and our engineering can inspire others. Sometimes we leave messages in our work that others can find for that purpose. So we invite all of you to give it a try and your work. “
Eagle-eyed space fans took up Chen’s challenge and made short work of unraveling the code.
The parachute’s hidden message includes NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory motto, “Dare mighty things,” as well as GPS coordinates for JPL in Pasadena, California.
The messages were parachuted using binary code in the white and orange gores, or fabric triangles. The inner part of the parachute contains “Dare Mighty Things,” with every word in an expanding ring of bloodshed. The band around the parachute is where the GPS coordinates for JPL can be found.
The motto is taken from a quote by Theodore Roosevelt: ‘It is much better to dare to do mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though they are plagued by failure … than to belong to those poor minds who do not enjoy or suffer because they are in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat. “
The rover was built by the JPL team, where the mission is managed.
Ian Clark, the rover’s systems engineer, was the brains behind the binary code pattern on the parachute.
It’s not the first Easter egg to ship with the Perseverance rover, and the mission team has suggested that more will be revealed in footage the rover returns in the future.
The rover carries silicon chips with the names of nearly 11 million people who participated in the “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign, as well as 155 essays submitted by students entering a competition to name the rover. Perseverance also has a metal plate in tribute to health workers during the pandemic.
On the deck of the rover is a symbol-laden calibration target for Mastcam-Z, or the rover’s pair of zoomable cameras. The calibration target includes color swatches to adjust camera settings, as well as symbols of a man and a woman, a fern, a dinosaur, a rocket traveling from Earth to Mars, a model of the inner solar system, DNA and cyanobacteria , which is one of the earliest life forms on Earth.
The target also includes the motto “Two worlds, one beginning,” which refers to the idea that Earth and Mars are made of the same dust that swirled around the sun billions of years ago.
The calibration target for the SHERLOC instrument, ie scanning residential environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, also contains some hidden gems.
The bottom row contains materials for space suits to see how they react over time to the radiation in the atmosphere of Mars. One of these is a piece of polycarbonate that can be used for a helmet visor. It also acts as a geocache target and is etched with 221B Baker Street, the address of beloved fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
The top row, which will be used to fine-tune the settings on the instrument, contains a slice of meteorite from Mars.
Perseverance’s fellow robber Curiosity has its share of Easter eggs too. When the rover began exploring the surface of Mars in August 2012, it left zigzagging patterns in the red dust based on the tread of its aluminum wheels.