A parachute about 70 feet wide has to open faster than the speed of sound in the thin air of Mars. When the first images appear, you will need to quickly answer a simple question: is the canopy positioned as it should or is it crooked? A white parachute is much less useful for that. You want a pattern that you can read at a glance. For that, first and foremost, there was the orange and white pattern of Perseverance’s 70-foot-diameter supersonic parachute. It seemed decorative, almost festive, but it served its purpose. The real work: reading a parachute at a glance Allen Chen, who led Perseverance’s entry, descent and landing team, explained it clearly. “The distinct patterns are useful,” he said, “to help us determine the orientation of the parachute clock.” In layman’s terms, that means how much the deck has rotated relative to the spacecraft hanging below it. You can only judge that if there are marks on the fabric to trace. The pattern also helped in a second sense, in the split second when the parachute opens. “Contrasting sections can be useful,” Chen noted, “to track different parts of the parachute as it inflates.” Give the high-speed cameras some contrast and you can watch the canopy fill and detect if any parts are lagging or tangled. What most people overlooked when watching the first video of a spacecraft landing on Mars is that the exact arrangement of those sections was not random. That left a systems engineer some room to be smart. The hidden layer, hidden in plain sight. That engineer was Ian Clark, a crossword puzzle fan. He treated the rings as a binary code, with the orange and white sections representing ones and zeros. Read the pattern and it stops being decoration and starts being text. The trick that was proposed was to make the code real without turning it into a billboard. Clark described the challenge as “trying to find a way to codify it but not make it too obvious.” He had reportedly been thinking about the idea for a couple of years before launch, and by his account, only about six people knew it was there before the rover landed. What it actually says Decoded, the message comes in two parts. The three inner rings spell out “Dare Mighty Things,” JPL’s motto, a one-line summary of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” speech. The outer ring is where it gets sneaky. It hides a set of GPS coordinates, 34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W, that point not anywhere on Mars but to Earth, to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, landing approximately 10 feet from the entrance to the laboratory’s visitor center. A parachute descending toward Mars carried, woven into its pattern, the address of the laboratory where the rover was built. Why the Internet Decrypted It in Hours During the February 22 press conference, Chen did not simply confirm that the message existed. He challenged people to read it. “Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose,” he said. “So we invite you all to try it and show your work.” They did it. People online translated the binary and plotted the coordinates within a few hours. Perseverance’s chief engineer, Adam Steltzner, saw what happened and reacted as he would if a party trick went perfectly: “It looks like the Internet cracked the code in about 6 hours!” he tweeted. “Oh, Internet, is there anything you can’t do?” Speed says something about design. A code meant to defeat everyone is different from a code meant to be defeated. Clark’s “not too obvious” was aimed at people who would recognize an orange and white ring pattern as binary. Once “Dare Mighty Things” drops, the rest of the code follows and the outer ring of coordinates is just arithmetic. The puzzle was hard enough to be satisfying and easy enough to solve before dinner. Clark seems to have enjoyed being discovered. When asked if he would do it again, he said, according to one account, that “next time” he would have to be “a little more creative.” Read by cameras, intended for people There is a quiet irony in all this. The pattern was built to be read by cameras facing the Martian sky, checking the orientation and inflation of the shell during a descent that lasted seconds. But the message inside was for people standing on the ground, squinting at a still image and making binaries by hand. A parachute pattern works either way. Inserting a motto and a particular direction through it costs almost nothing, and turns a diagnostic tool into an invitation, a way to attract strangers to the work and make them feel, for an afternoon, as if they were part of the mission. Engineering aimed at Mars. The message pointed home. Standards Space Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use artificial intelligence tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards and masthead.
