“You might notice the pattern that’s on the parachute here,” said Allen Chen, the entry, descent, and landing lead for the rover, Monday. “Distinct patterns are useful in helping us determine the clocking orientation of the parachute. Also the contrasting sectors can be useful in tracking different portions of the parachute as it inflates.”

“In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts and our engineering can inspire others. Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work.”

And in no time, space fans took up Chen on his challenge and began their decoding tactics to unravel the message.

It looks like the internet has cracked the code in something like 6 hours! Oh internet is there anything you can’t do? For those who just want to know: #Mars2020 #CountdownToMars pic.twitter.com/yTJCEnbuLY

— Adam Steltzner (@steltzner) February 23, 2021

Though the message may not be what you one was yearning for. The cryptic message included the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory motto, “Dare mighty things,” in addition to the GPS coordinates for JPL in Pasadena, California.

Using binary code, the messages were included on the parachute with white and orange gores, or pieces of triangular fabric. The band surrounding the parachute provides the GPS coordinates for JPL’s location. While the inner portion of the parachute provides “Dare mighty things,” with each word moving outward on the expanding rings.

The motto’s root comes from a Theodore Roosevelt quote: “Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure – than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory but defeat.”

The mission is managed by a team at JPL, which is also where the rover was constructed. The mastermind behind the binary code parachute concept was the rover’s systems engineer, Ian Clark.

The brain child of Ian Clark- who has done anything the project asked him to do, whether it was lead, develop, and execute a supersonic parachute test program, prove the cleanliness of the sampling system, or support EDL operations. All around sharp and selfless dude. #Mars2020 https://t.co/xJ09Qx8ezt

— Allen Chen (@icancallubetty) February 23, 2021

Though the cryptic message was inspiring and playful for space fans, it is not the first of its kind for the Perseverance rover. And the mission team suggested that as more images return from the rover in the future, more will be revealed.

Nearly 11 million people participated in the “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign, and the rover carries silicon chips containing those names. Perseverance also pays a tribute to the health care workers who battled the pandemic on the front line, by adding a metal tribute plate, as well as 155 student essays who entered a contest to name the rover.

Located on the rover’s deck, is a symbol-laden calibration target for Mastercam-Z, or a pair of zoomable cameras. The color swatches provided on the calibration target help adjust the camera’s settings, and in between the swatches symbols of a man and a woman, a dinosaur, a fern, DNA and cyanobacteria (one of Earth’s earliest forms of life), a rocket traveling from Earth to Mars, and a model of the inner solar system. At the bottom of the target includes the phrase, “Two worlds, one beginning,” alluding to this idea that Earth and Mars were co-created from the same dust that swirled around the sun some billions of years ago.

The SHERLOC instrument, Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, carries its own set of hidden gems. The bottom row of the instrument contains spacesuit materials to evaluate how they react over time to the radiation of the Martian atmosphere. And one piece specifically is polycarbonate, that can be used for a helmet visor, which doubles as a geocaching target, and has 221B Baker Street etched into the sample, the address of the renowned fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The top row, to be used to fine tune the settings of the instrument, contains a piece of Martian meteorite.

Perseverance is not the only rover collecting Easter eggs. Curiosity, which began its exploration on the Martian surface in August 2012, left zigzagging patterns from the tread of its aluminum wheels. Embedded into the tread are tiny stamp-like dots. And as the rover roams the surface and leaves its tracks, the stamp-like dots leave “JPL” into the surface of the planet, which acts as Morse code for the JPL mission teams.

Although NASA has invested in several Mars missions before, this is probably its most ambitious one. It was announced in 2012 and the purpose of the mission was to study the planet at a deeper level than what has been done so far. The rover would mainly be collecting evidence that would be studied in laboratories on Earth to determine if Mars harbored microbial life in the past.

A similar was launched by NASA in the past. In 2012, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars to discover the mineral life on the planet. When the mineral samples that the rover brought were analyzed, scientists discovered that there may have been microbial life on the planet. It has since been eight years and NASA is now launching this new mission to find further evidence to support these claims.

One of the reasons why a new mission is being launched after so long is because the technology required for it is incredibly complex. The agency had to invest a lot of time- and money- into research and development as this technology has never been used before. As per NASA, the Perseverance rover is fitted with seven “state-of-the-art tools for acquiring information about Martian geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions, and potential signs of life (biosignatures).” It will be the first-ever rover to gather and store samples from the surface of Mars so that they can be later retrieved and brought back to Earth by astronauts on a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

Another reason why the rover is a first of its kind is that it is equipped with high-definition cameras with top-notch imaging features. Not only this, but it will also have HD microphones to capture the sounds of Mars- another thing that has never been done before. The sounds that will be captured include entry, descent, landing, and driving on the terrain.

The rover will also carry two technological demonstration missions (TDMs) with it called MOXIE and Ingenuity. MOXIE stands for Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment which is designed to test the technology that can convert carbon dioxide to oxygen in Mars’s atmosphere. This is important as it would allow scientists to determine whether or not people can be sent to Mars. Ingenuity is a rotorcraft or helicopter that is capable of flying on Mars. It will also provide scientists with crucial information on the gravitational forces on Mars, which will in turn allow them to design a rovercraft that is ideal for the planet’s conditions. This testing serves as an important purpose and is crucial to achieving the goal of Mars colonization as these rovercrafts can serve as delivery systems.

This is a mission that has been in the works for a long time and NASA was planning on completing it within a particular time frame. However, the COVID-19 pandemic was a major setback that pushed deadlines. One significant challenge that NASA faced was assembling integrations during the final phases of the mission’s development, as a large majority of NASA and JPL staff were working from home. Omas Baez, the senior launch director, said “I never would have thought that a launch director would be working from home and I’ve done that for the last five months,” and that “It’s humbling to see how our whole team from the range, to our partners at JPL, to our partners at ULA, to our folks at headquarters – how we all had to adjust to work in this environment, to work electronically.” Despite the setbacks imposed by the pandemic, they were still able to launch the rover by the target date.

The original launch date was July 18, which is at the very start of the interplanetary liftoff window that generally lasts a month. Another challenge, apart from the lockdown resulting from the pandemic, was regarding a crane at the Vertical Integration Facility. The ULA had to spend a few days dealing with this, which pushed the launch date to July 22. This was further delayed to July 30, as explained in a press release from NASA, “due to launch vehicle processing delays in preparation for spacecraft mate operations.”

The Atlas V (541 configuration) consists of a common core booster and four rocket motors that are carrying a payload that is 197 feet tall. The rocket provided a thrust of 2 million pounds, which rocketed the spacecraft away from Florida and towards the Atlantic Ocean. The separation between the two stages of the rocket happened after around 90 seconds of flight, as the rocket motors were exhausted. This coat phase lasted around 30 minutes, after which the Centaur completed another nominal burn lasting around 8 minutes. It delivered the payload to a heliocentric, rather than Earth-bound, orbit.

After the separation, the Perseverance rover was propelled towards Mars and the Centaur (in the upper-stage) performed a maneuver known as the blowdown. This is done to prevent it from entering Mars, providing planetary protection. Approximately 20 minutes after this procedure, Perseverance started sending signals to Earth via its transmitter. These signals were received by the transmitters at NASA’s Deep Space Network, which has arrays of giant antennas.

This interplanetary journey and exploration of the red planet with the Perseverance rover will continue for years to come as NASA is planning on another launch on February 18, 2021.