Touchdown Confirmed!
On February 18, NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover finally landed at the Jezero Crater on the red planet after a seven month journey. Perseverance will study Mars' habitability, seek signs of past microbial life, collect and store samples of selected rock and soil, and prepare for future human missions.
Filipino-American Gregorio Villar III, worked on the Entry Descent Landing System of the mission and is also an operations systems engineer in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who manufactured the rover.
Aboard the rover are three fingernail-sized chips containing 10,932,295 names stenciled by electron beams, of participants from the Send Your Name to Mars campaign.
In addition to that, I've also joined the next Send Your Name to Mars campaign. Four days before Perseverance departed, I sent mine and my family's names to the future Mars Mission scheduled to take place on July 2026.
As of February 26, 2021 there are 8,496,887 new reservations.
The Hidden Message of Perseverance's Parachute
Redditors and Twitter users deciphered coordinates and an inspirational message in the rover’s red-and-white parachute pattern.
The supersonic easter egg reads “dare mighty things”: the motto of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), home of the Perseverance mission team. The outer rim of the parachute is also encoded with the coordinates 34°11’58” N, 118°10’31” W, which spells out the location of JPL in Pasadena, California.