A secret symbol hidden in the umbrella of perseverance

Rather determined netizens claim to have decoded a secret message that NASA hidden on a parachute that allowed the persistent robot to safely land on Mars last week.

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According to some observations reported by social media and repeated by many media outlets Tuesday morning, the white and red umbrella patterns form a sentence of three words in English.

The pattern is not symmetrical, but has a certain sequence. Thus it would be a computer binary code representing the letters, with red corresponding to the number 1 and white to 0.

Thus each of the concentric rings of the parachute shape represents one word. The zeros and ones must then be divided into ten-character parts, and from there, adding 64 gives the computer’s ASCII code to represent a letter.

For example, seven white bands, one red bar, and two other white bars represent 0000000100, the binary code for four. Adding 64 to that, you get 68, which is the ASCII code for the letter D, “The Guardian” explained.

Consequently, this decoding result will give the phrase “dare the powerful things,” which can be translated as “dare the powerful things,” a phrase used as a slogan by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This slogan is taken from a letter by Theodore Roosevelt dated 1899, in which he made clear that it is better to win a glory, even if it means losing, than to try nothing.

Investigators on the web also noted that the pattern on the outer edge of the parachute represents 34 ° 11’58 “N 118 ° 10’31” W, the geolocation symbol for the JPL, which has done a lot of work on the Robot Perseverance.

But the specific pattern isn’t just a symbol, the shapes and colors allow scientists to assess the angle at which it unfolded, and whether it is twisted.

NASA itself launched the Decoding Challenge during docking last Thursday.

Sometimes we leave messages to find out in our work. So we invite you all to give it a try and show us what you can do! “

NASA has already used this term in connection with their missions to Mars. In 2013, she released a trailer for the Curiosity rover mission called “Dare mighty Things”.