CMU Graduate Student Cracks Mars Rover Code

Down here on Earth, nearly 130 million miles from Mars, Adithya Balaji eagerly watched high definition video of Perseverance and its successful descent onto the red planet. From his desk in Raleigh, North Carolina, Balaji took note of the rover's parachute and its peculiar orange and white pattern. He thought it was likely functional, perhaps for aligning cameras. Within the pattern, however, lay hidden a call for humanity to continue to push out toward the unknown.

After NASA released that video — four days following Perseverance's Feb. 18 touchdown — systems engineer Allen Chen suggested during a news briefing that there was a coded message in the landing. Balaji grabbed his tablet and got to work. Hours later, a myriad of Twitter notifications drained his phone's battery after his posted solution blasted off across the internet.

"Rocketry has always been a passion of mine, and it's not every day you get a chance to solve a cryptography puzzle on another planet," said Balaji, a master's degree candidate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. "That's the exciting thing about space. You get to see the whole world come together to solve a problem."

Every passion has an origin, and Balaji points to his parents, public television and encyclopedias as igniting his interest in the final frontier.