NASA Hid an Inspiring Message on the Parachute of the Mars Rover Perseverance
February 25, 2021 at 09:44AM NASA’s Perseverance rover is the gift that keeps on giving. In the wake of the rover’s awe-inspiring touchdown on Mars on Feb 18, an event that brought over 20 million people together to watch NASA’s livestream of the successful landing, there was even more to the incredible spectacle than met the eye. An intrepid computer science student and his father cracked a coded secret message hidden within the pattern of the rover’s parachute it used to descend onto the Marian surface. Allen Chen, the engineer in charge of the landing system, hinted during a Monday news conference that video footage of Perseverance’s parachute deploying contained a hidden missive. So the 23-year-old student, Maxence Abela, and his Google software engineer father, Jerome Abela, set to work solving the puzzle. By breaking down the parachute’s pattern into 10-digit sequences of binary code, the Abelas deduced that the numerical sequences within the parachute’s inner t...