NASA’s Mars rover had a secret message in its parachute. Meet the man behind it
The footage gave the world a glimpse of an often entirely invisible process, including the deployment of the parachute to slow down the spacecraft after entering the atmosphere.
The 70.5-foot supersonic parachute was an extraordinary engineering challenge, said Ian Clark, systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Clark, who has been at JPL since 2009, worked on the parachute for years. He led three tests of it on Earth to ensure that the parachute could survive inflating in wind that would be twice the speed of sound, or Mach 2.
“We did testing that hadn’t been done really since the Viking program (in the ’70s and ’80s), which was supersonic parachute testing of scale parachutes,” Clark said.
The parachute testing was carried out at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in 2017 and 2018. The testing team replicated the Martian environment by using sounding rockets to reach halfway to the edge of space at twice the speed of sound and deploying the parachute.
Nylon, Technora and Kevlar were used to make the largest parachute ever sent to Mars, material that was three times stronger than what was used for the Curiosity rover landing in 2012.
The team felt confident in their testing, but it all came down to the parachute’s main performance on Mars.
A secret code
Easter eggs have a history of being part of the missions NASA sends to Mars. For example, thanks to tiny holes in its wheels, the Curiosity rover — which has been exploring Gale Crater — leaves “JPL” tracks in Morse code as it makes its way around the Martian landscape.
While working on the parachute design, Clark knew there would be a lot of utility in creating a pattern. Patterns on parachutes help convey its orientation, how it inflates and whether there is any damage after inflation. Checkerboard patterns can be confusing, so Clark wanted to use something less uniform and more distinct.
Then, Clark and some of his fellow team members decided to have a little bit of fun.
Clark is a puzzle enthusiast. He does the New York Times crossword each morning. His mother also saves the puzzles from the Sunday edition in a manila envelope that she gives him every time he visits her.
He thought about encoding words using binary code. But what would the message be? While he has never been one to look at a motivational poster and derive much meaning from it, three words stood out to Clark: “Dare mighty things.”
The motto, taken from a Theodore Roosevelt speech, is in buildings all across the JPL campus.
“Week after week, I definitely never got tired of reading ‘Dare Mighty Things,'” Clark said. “And it’s not just the phrase, but it’s even the broader context of the speech. This great inspirational message really represented the culture of JPL and NASA as a whole.”
He also included the GPS coordinates for JPL on the outer ring of the parachute.
During a press conference where the video was shared with the public on Monday, entry, descent and landing lead Allen Chen teased that there might be something to decipher in the orange-and-white…
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