The British company that made the parachute's fabric has a great little piece about it here [0]. In 15 years they went from a demo at a symposium in the US to a canopy that could achieve a 98% reduction in the re-entry speed of a massive payload.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.heathcoat.co.uk/perseverance-landing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.heathcoat.co.uk/perseverance-landing/</a>
I was one of the people who went viral on twitter and was interviewed by the NYT for posting the solution. [1, 2] It was really neat to see people all over the world come together to solve this puzzles in <6 hours. [3]<p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/adithya_balaji/status/1364020082599460872?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/adithya_balaji/status/136402008259946087...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachu...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://twitter.com/steltzner/status/1364076615932645379?s=20" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/steltzner/status/1364076615932645379?s=2...</a>
JPL has a history of hiding messages like this. One of the rovers leaves tracks that spell "JPL" in morse code. I think it's all kind of fun.
A PDF of slides, inside a git repo, and concluding with a picture from - and a non clickable link to - a tweet from another person, seems like an awfully peculiar way to share content.<p>If you think parsing that sentence is insane: exactly.
Here's where the coordinates on the outer rim point to (For the lazy) <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/MCqYxngeQLJRMNeK7" rel="nofollow">https://goo.gl/maps/MCqYxngeQLJRMNeK7</a>
official word: <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars-decoder-ring" rel="nofollow">https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars-decoder-ring</a>
A little disappointing actually! I thought the pattern was a clever way to capture the status of the parachute in the event of failure, so if all they got was a garbled low-res image before the lander crashed to the surface they could deduce which section failed. Alas, it was just an easter-egg..