Thursday, February 25, 2021

Chute code..


Here's a little geeky story for those of us who followed the recent Mars lander (Perseverance) mission and watched in awe as a parachute slowed it down upon hitting the Martian atmosphere, and then rockets kicked in and lowered a vehicle the size of a car gently onto the surface of another planet! 

Apparently people were wondering what the pattern on the parachute was for, anyway, as is the way with such things the geekerati got to work and decoded it. It's a binary pattern which starts at the blue arrow in the picture and then you can read a series of 1's and 0's (bits) around the circumference in four concentric circles (clockwise) starting in the middle. The each binary digit (a group of eight bits) represents a letter of the alphabet where "A" is 1 and so on. The message reads "Dare Mighty Things" which is the moto of JPL, the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, USA. Pretty neat stuff (and the parachute was manufactured in the UK!)

For the full decoding and explanation, see below..




 

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