Thursday, February 25, 2021

Dare Mighty Things




If one looks at the chute slowing Perseverance's rapid descent to manageable levels during the 7 minutes of terror of remotely landing the rover on the red planet, one sees a message more than just apt... Dare Mighty Things. Seems the NASA researchers also love easter eggs to decorate amazing tech, much to the delight of us rubes. :)




On the rover's deck is a symbol-laden calibration target for Mastcam-Z, or the rover's pair of zoomable cameras. The calibration target includes color swatches to adjust the cameras' settings, but also symbols of a man and a woman, a fern, a dinosaur, a rocket traveling from Earth to Mars, a model of the inner solar system, DNA and cyanobacteria, which is one of the earliest forms of life on Earth.

The target also includes the motto, "Two worlds, one beginning," which alludes to the idea that Earth and Mars were created from the same dust swirling around the sun billions of years ago.

Dinos rule. :)


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