[imagesource: NASA]

The Perseverance Mars rover is the gift that keeps on giving.

The live-streamed landing itself was gripping, as we waited alongside the NASA team through that gruelling seven minutes of terror, before confirmation came through that ‘Percy’, as she’s affectionately known, had touched down safely and was “healthy”.

A few days later, NASA released a first of its kind video of Percy landing, with aerial footage of Mars, and the supersonic parachute that assisted her in her descent.

A few keen-eyed Redditors on the r/nasa subreddit and Twitter users looked at that parachute and picked up on something that most of us missed.

Get ready for another very cool fact about the Mars mission, via VICE.

The pattern on the parachute wasn’t random, and actually contained a message in binary code.

Before we go into what it says, here’s how Reddit users ‘rdtwt1’ and ‘tend0g’ decoded it:

The phrase is embossed on the chute with red and white stripes as a stand-in for the binary characters 1 and 0 respectively.

Image: NASA

Each 10-stripe sequence adds up to a number value that can be converted to a letter in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) table of designations.

Another redditor, tend0g, decoded the portion containing the JPL headquarters coordinates.

It reads “Dare Mighty Things”: the motto of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), home of the Perseverance mission team.

The outer rim is also encoded with the coordinates  34°11’58” N, 118°10’31” W – the location of JPL in Pasadena, California.

Abela_Paf on Twitter provided an image of what it would look like in binary code:

Image: Abela_Paf / Twitter

“Dare Mighty Things” is on display all over JPL, and also appeared on the post-landing notes shared with the general public

The moment that my team dreamed of for years, now a reality. Dare mighty things. #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/8SgV53S9KG

— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 19, 2021

In related news, the first helicopter designed to fly on another planet, Ingenuity, which was developed in Southern Africa, has sent back its first status report, and it ready for action.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more on that front, soon.

[source:vice]