'Dare mighty things': hidden message found on Nasa Mars rover parachute

[muriel_volestrangler]

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.

Link to tweet

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.

Link to tweet

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/feb/23/dare-mighty-things-hidden-message-found-on-nasa-mars-rover-parachute

(The 'add 64' is just to get it to display as ASCII - you could equally say it's just the order of the letters of the alphabet, with 4 being D and so on. So in ASCII it's all in capitals.)

[lame54]

1. #freebritany