![]() A more solemn addition was an aluminum plate that honors hardships of those affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Chen had dropped his cryptic hint during the news conference.Īlso on Perseverance are three small chips with the names of 10.9 million people stenciled on them, part of NASA’s efforts for the public to participate in its robotic missions. Abela posted on Twitter his answer at 4:36 p.m. The message on the inner three rings: “DARE MIGHTY THINGS.” The number 1 corresponded to the letter A, the number 2 was B, 3 was C, 4 was D and so on. 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. ![]() 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. ![]() That, they decided, was not a coincidence. “Every 10 bits, there would be three zeros in a row,” Maxence Abela said. Abela noticed that the digits seemed to fit in groups of 10. They tried breaking up the digits into groups of 8 - a common practice used in computer programming - but that too yielded gibberish. “We couldn’t find anything that looked like anything,” Mr. 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. That translated into a long string of 1s and 0s. That was the first clue that the puzzle solvers pursued on Monday.įor 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. When computer scientists see something in black and white - or, in this case, orange and white - they think of binary code, the 1s and 0s that are the language of computers. Until this week, only about half a dozen people knew about it. ![]() Clark’s analysis showed no ill effects, and the plan went forward. “Like could having more white than orange, or vice versa, mean that the parachute was going to warm up differently and maybe that would change its behavior?”Īfter all, mission managers would have been embarrassed if they had to explain how they lost a $2.7 billion mission because a parachute engineer had sneaked in a secret message.īut Dr. “There’s all kinds of second-guessing questions,” Dr. Wallace said.Įven a pattern of just orange and white, the two colors of previous parachutes, raised potential issues. “We were unwilling to go to a cloth that was dyed in a color that we had never used before,” Mr. 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. ![]()
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