Coded parachutes

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Gob
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Coded parachutes

Post by Gob »

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.

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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 pattern on the outer-edge of the parachute is additionally believed to represent 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W, the geolocation code for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which carried out much of the work on Perseverance.

The origins of the phrase are an 1899 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which he said: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

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.”

Nasa has previously used the phrase in association with its Mars missions. In 2013 it issued a trailer video of the Curiosity rover mission entitled “Dare mighty things”. The current mission has also used the phrase in tweets marking the successful landing.


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Bicycle Bill
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Re: Coded parachutes

Post by Bicycle Bill »

I wouldn't put it past them.  The wheels on the other Mars rover ('Curiosity') were molded/cast so that the Morse code symbols for the letters  'J - P - L'  would be visible in the tire tracks left in the dust.
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-"BB"-
Yes, I suppose I could agree with you ... but then we'd both be wrong, wouldn't we?

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