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. :)

"You might notice the pattern that's on the parachute here," said Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for the rover, on Monday. "Distinct patterns are useful in helping us determine the clocking orientation of the parachute. Also, the contrasting sections can be useful in tracking different portions of the parachute as it inflates.

"In addition to enabling incredible science, we hope our efforts and our engineering can inspire others. Sometimes we leave messages in our work for others to find for that purpose. So we invite you all to give it a shot and show your work."

It gets better ...

The motto borrows from a Theodore Roosevelt quote: "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure ... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

The calibration target for the SHERLOC instrument, or Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals, also carries some hidden gems.

The bottom row includes spacesuit materials to see how they react over time to the radiation in the Martian atmosphere. One is a piece of polycarbonate that could be used for a helmet visor. It doubles as a geocaching target and is etched with 221B Baker Street, the address of the beloved fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

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. :)