NASA's Mars Parachute Had a Hidden Code. Meet the People Who Cracked It | Hacker News Reader

NASA's Mars Parachute Had a Hidden Code. Meet the People Who Cracked It

nytimes.com

15 pointsgumby5 comments

  Even a pattern of just orange and white, the two colors of previous parachutes, raised potential issues. “There’s all kinds of second-guessing questions,” Dr. Clark said. “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?”

Amazing. I wouldn't have thought of that. If that same care and thoughtfulness goes into the code that we write...

I thought it was a gray code to monitor lander rotation but it was something a lot more interesting.

I believe the purpose was two-fold. The primary purpose of the pattern was for tracking the parachute deployment, but they made the pattern a message as a bonus :)

Secret Parachute or the Sparachute

Non paywall: https://archive.is/4RC7x

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