This week all eyes have been on the NASA with its Mars rover, Perserverance, making a successful landing on Mars after after a seven-month journey spanning nearly half a billion kilometres.
The planet has long been a death trap for incoming spacecraft, and it took a nail-biting 11 and a half minutes for a signal confirming the successful landing in the Jezero Crater to reach Earth.
“Touchdown confirmed, Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,” flight controller Swati Mohan said to cheers in the control room as the touchdown was confirmed.
“I’m safe on Mars. Perseverance will get you anywhere,” read a message on the rover’s Twitter account.
The imagery and vision were released by NASA on Tuesday morning to the delight of space enthusiasts the world over. But now we hear that there was an extra little treat in store for the astro nerds amongst us. The huge parachute used by NASA’s Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message, thanks to a puzzle-lover on the spacecraft team.
At a news conference about the event, Allen Chen, the engineer in charge of the landing system, narrated what could be seen and learned in the slowed-down video.
He added, cryptically, that his team hoped to inspire others. “Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose,” he said. “So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work.”
Space lovers and computer science students around the world were onto it within minutes, collaborating and trading insights via Twitter and Reddit forums, and solved it within hours.
Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the orange and white stripes of the 21-metre nylon parachute so they’d be able to see how it was oriented during Perseverance’s descent to the Red Planet.
Systems engineer and crossword hobbyist Ian Clark came up with the idea to use a binary code to spell out a hidden message. Interestingly it was a message that spoke directly to computer scientists. When computer scientists see something in black and white — or, in this case, orange and white — they think of binary code, the 1s and 0s that are the language of computers. That was the first clue that the puzzle solvers pursued.
Through some trial and error of rearranging the 1s and os, they cracked the message: “Dare Mighty Things”.
It’s a line from former US president Theodore Roosevelt and a mantra of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is running the Perseverance project.
The message adorns many of the walls of JPL’s mission headquarters in Pasadena, California.
Programme directors have promised more so-called hidden Easter eggs during the Perseverance project.
They should be visible once Perseverance’s 2-metre arm is deployed in a few days and starts photographing under the vehicle, and again when the rover is driving in a couple of weeks’ time.
Perseverance has landed on the Red Planet. (Supplied: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
You can follow along with the NASA Perserverance Rover mission here.
One things for sure, the world will be watching, and perserverance really will pay off.
