NASA hid a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover on Mars

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Engineers hinted they had hidden a code in the parachute that landed the Perseverance rover. Within hours, puzzle enthusiasts cracked it.

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The 70-foot-wide parachute consisted of 80 strips of fabric radiating outward from the center to form a hemisphere-shape canopy, and each strip consisted of four pieces. Dr. Clark thus had 320 pieces to work with.

Some of his ideas would have required additional colors, but that could have threatened the parachute’s integrity if untested dyes weakened the fabric fibers.

“We were unwilling to go to a cloth that was dyed in a color that we had never used before,” Mr. Wallace said.

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For each orange section on the Perseverance parachute, Maxence Abela and his father wrote down a 1, and for each white section, they assigned a 0. That translated into a long string of 1s and 0s.

They thought that perhaps the digits could be rearranged into a picture, like the message that scientists broadcast in 1974 from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to tell distant alien civilizations of humans on Earth.

“We couldn’t find anything that looked like anything,” Mr. Abela said.

They tried breaking up the digits into groups of 8 — a common practice used in computer programming — but that too yielded gibberish.

Then the elder Mr. Abela noticed that the digits seemed to fit in groups of 10. “Every 10 bits, there would be three zeros in a row,” Maxence Abela said. That, they decided, was not a coincidence.

Still, the resulting numbers did not make sense until they realized they had read the 1s and 0s in the wrong direction, anticlockwise instead of clockwise. When they wrote down the digits in the opposite order, the 10-digit chunks of binary code translated into small numbers, which could then be assigned to letters. The number 1 corresponded to the letter A, the number 2 was B, 3 was C, 4 was D and so on.

The message on the inner three rings: “DARE MIGHTY THINGS.”

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