Posted on 02/25/2021 3:11:56 AM PST by buckalfa
The huge parachute used by NASA's Perseverance rover to land on Mars contained a secret message, thanks to a puzzle lover on the spacecraft team.
Systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out "Dare Mighty Things" in the orange and white strips of the 70-foot (21-meter) parachute. He also included the GPS coordinates for the mission's headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Clark, a crossword hobbyist, came up with the idea two years ago. Engineers wanted an unusual pattern in the nylon fabric to know how the parachute was oriented during descent. Turning it into a secret message was "super fun," he said Tuesday.
Only about six people knew about the encoded message before Thursday's landing, according to Clark. They waited until the parachute images came back before putting out a teaser during a televised news conference Monday.
It took just a few hours for space fans to figure it out, Clark said. Next time, he noted, "I'll have to be a little bit more creative."
"Dare Mighty Things"—a line from President Theodore Roosevelt—is a mantra at JPL and adorns many of the center's walls. The trick was "trying to come up with a way of encoding it but not making it too obvious," Clark said.
I guess that is one way to do it. It sounds like all of our landings (including the moon) were planned out from the very beginning.
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It really is quite an amazing bit of planning and navigation. The probe, on a direct flight from Earth to Mars, is adjusted in its flight trajectory on its approach Mars, and without orbiting the planet, instead directly descends for a landing. The calculations are so good, they can then land exactly at the coordinates chosen for the mission.
The orbits of the Earth and Mars, the velocity of the ship, the rotation of Mars. That’s a lot of math to calculate hitting the designated landing.
Heh, exactly...see my post above...:)
LOL, in that light, I would hope all those robot-building geeks who make the robots for the “BattleBots” show would give their country a patriotic return on their investment!
“Stop leaving your junk on our planet..clean up after yourselves!”
GPS coordinates - useless unless you know how they’re geo-referenced here on earth.
I don’t know. Maybe JPL missed a great opportunity for Muslim outreach. Maybe the message should have been: “Allah Akbar!”
I'm sure Martian High Command is delighted to know where to send their retaliatory strike.
“Will the triple breasted whore from “Total Recall” please contact us.”
“BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE”
A “War of The Worlds” scenario can no longer happen. The Martians would land in California but thanks to all of the diseases illegal aliens brought in, the germs and viruses would kill the Martians off before they could shoot their first death ray.
I just learned of the Friedmans last month. Whether they knew it or not, they and especially Elizebeth, were evidence of God’s favor and providence towards the USA.
As long as one doesn’t confuse metric and imperial units!
Excellent! You have the beginnings of a SciFi book/movie!
Just to note...I do like that they did it. I enjoy things like that.
It’s just that I enjoy anthropomorphizing Martians.
They hate that.
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