Dare Mighty Things – Perseverance Rover

The phrase “Dare mighty things” was encoded on the parachute of NASA’s Perseverance rover using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code.

Using binary code, two messages have been encoded in the neutral white and international-orange parachute gores (the sections that make up the canopy’s hemispherical shape).

Each of the concentric rings in the parachute’s pattern represents one of the words. The zeroes and ones need to be split up into chunks of 10 characters, and from that, adding 64 gives you the computer ASCII code representing a letter.

For example, seven white stripes, a red stripe and then two more white stripes represents 0000000100, the binary for four. Adding 64 to that gives 68, the ASCII code for the letter D.

Credit

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Tags: Dare Mighty Things, NASA, Perseverance Rover