TORONTO -- Last week, the NASA鈥檚 new Mars rover, Perseverance, sailed down safely to the planet, a white and red parachute billowing out above the spacecraft carrying it.
But the parachute didn鈥檛 just help protect Perseverance 鈥� it also contained a hidden message.
The internet got its first look at the landing process and the parachute when NASA released a video of the rover鈥檚 descent on Monday. The parachute had a distinctive design, comprised of sections coloured in white and red in seemingly random segments.
However, NASA officials hinted at there being a code in the parachute.
鈥淚n addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts and our engineering can inspire others,鈥� Allen Chen, the project鈥檚 Entry, Descent and Landing lead, said in a press conference Monday. 鈥淪ometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose. So we invite you all to give it a shot, and show your work.鈥�
Within hours, internet sleuths had cracked it.
The different sections of colour actually spell out 鈥淒ARE MIGHTY THINGS鈥�, the motto of NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Each word is spelled out clockwise in a different ring moving outwards from the centre of the parachute.
Maxence Abela, an IT student at Epitech 鈥� also known as The Paris Graduate School of Digital Innovation 鈥� posted on Twitter that he and his father had figured out that the words were hidden in a 10-bit pattern in the four main rings on the parachute.
When they transformed the colours of red and white into binary code, those 10-bit strings of code corresponded to different letters in the alphabet, spelling out the three word slogan.
Scientist Emily Calandrelli posted a Tik Tok explaining Abela鈥檚 reasoning. She also mentioned that the last ring of the parachute contained numbers 鈥� the coordinates to JPL鈥檚 mission headquarters in southern California.
The coordinates were the last piece of the puzzle, discovered by internet sleuths on reddit, and also
Chen to put the motto into the parachute colours was 鈥渢he brain child鈥� of JPL鈥檚 systems engineer Ian Clark.
Adam Stelzner, the chief engineer for the Perseverance team, confirmed Abela鈥檚 and the internet community鈥檚 work, posting a picture of the parachute with the words and the coordinates mapped out on top of the corresponding patterns.
鈥淚t looks like the internet has cracked the code in something like 6 hours!鈥� he added in the tweet. 鈥淥h internet is there anything you can鈥檛 do?鈥�
