That translated into a long string of 1s and 0s. That was the first clue that the puzzle solvers pursued on Monday.įor each orange section on the Perseverance parachute, Maxence Abela and his father wrote down a 1, and for each white section, they assigned a 0. When computer scientists see something in black and white - or, in this case, orange and white - they think of binary code, the 1s and 0s that are the language of computers. Until this week, only about half a dozen people knew about it. Clark’s analysis showed no ill effects, and the plan went forward. “Like could having more white than orange, or vice versa, mean that the parachute was going to warm up differently and maybe that would change its behavior?”Īfter all, mission managers would have been embarrassed if they had to explain how they lost a $2.7 billion mission because a parachute engineer had sneaked in a secret message.īut Dr. “There’s all kinds of second-guessing questions,” Dr. Wallace said.Įven a pattern of just orange and white, the two colors of previous parachutes, raised potential issues. “We were unwilling to go to a cloth that was dyed in a color that we had never used before,” Mr. Some of his ideas would have required additional colors, but that could have threatened the parachute’s integrity if untested dyes weakened the fabric fibers.
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