Secret code cracked on Mars rover parachute

Scientists at NASA hid a secret message in the supersonic parachute they used to land a car-sized rover on Mars.

Video beamed back to Earth showed the Perseverance rover touching down on the Red Planet, including a view of the underside of the canopy. The fabric had an unusual red-and-white design that set armchair space experts, communicating on the Internet, wondering if there was a hidden meaning.

Deciphering the message involved translating the colours of the parachute into binary code, and then letters. It emerged that each ring in the canopy spelled a word.

The full message read “Dare Mighty Things” — the motto of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where mission control was. The edge of the canopy, once decoded, showed a set of numbers representing mission control's co-ordinates. Adam Steltzner, Perseverance's chief engineer, confirmed the riddle had been solved.

“It looks like the internet has cracked the code in something like 6 hours! Oh internet is there anything you can't do?” he wrote on social media.

The mismatching red and white stripes were the first clue. Puzzlers then converted them to binary code — ones for red, noughts for white.

The ones and noughts were then separated into groups of 10, and each of those sections had 64 added to it.

Each final number was made into a letter using the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which represents text in computers.

The “Dare Mighty Things” motto comes from a speech Theodore Roosevelt gave in Chicago in 1899, a few years before he became U.S. president. In it he spoke about the “doctrine of the strenuous life” and urged Americans to “not shrink from danger.”

He said: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much.”

The Perseverance footage was the first high-quality video of a Mars landing and included images of the parachute opening successfully with explosive power.

Cameras used to film the descent and landing were off-the-shelf ones that NASA had hardly needed to modify.

Matt Wallace, Perseverance's deputy project manager, described how he was inspired to cover the rover in cameras after watching his 11-year-old gymnast daughter do a backflip while wearing a sports video camera.

He said: “She showed me the video and that's what led to this entry, descent and landing footage.”

Six cameras were used, looking up and down from different perspectives, and all but one worked.

Wallace said: “This was not a camera specifically designed for use on Mars. You can purchase the same camera off the Internet.”