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Message and a (Sample) Bottle

By: Jennifer Herseim | Categories: Alumni Achievements

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While on Mars, Perseverance will collect sediment and rock samples to be retrieved on a future mission. When those sample tubes return, scientists will eagerly look inside them to help answer the question: Was there life on Mars? To be confident that the samples are, indeed, Martian and not contaminated by Earth, Ian Clark was responsible for ensuring the rover met unprecedented requirements for cleanliness. Clark’s team had a “budget” of fewer than 10 parts per billion of total Earth-based organic compound in each15-gram sample. It was no easy task, considering signatures of life are all around us, Clark says. “On Earth, we exist in an immensely thick soup of organic compounds,” he says. “A single skin cell would have broken our budget.” The team had to re-envision the manufacturing process for the rover, everything from creating new protocols for protective gear to designing entirely new types of cleanrooms. “We had to build what is easily the cleanest thing we’ve ever sent to another planet. And quite possibly the cleanest thing humans have ever made,” Clark says.

While Clark was working to limit traces of Earth on the rover, he did leave his mark on the mission in a big way. While he was working on the rover’s supersonic parachute, he and others had the idea to embed a secret message in the orange and white pattern of the parachute. Very few people at NASA or JPL knew of the secret message until a press conference after the landing. A few hours later, Earthlings cracked the binary code, revealing the message: “Dare mighty things” and the coordinates of JPL in California.

When Clark and others learned that the Mars mission would include onboard cameras imaging the parachute as it deployed over Mars, they seized the opportunity to have some fun and inspire those watching on Earth. Clark thought of several ways to encode information into the parachute, but in the end, used binary code. Choosing a message was harder than the encoding, Clark adds. “Because of the space we had, it had to be concise, but meaningful.” He remembered how former JPL director, Charles Elachi, always pushed the message, “Dare mighty things,” which was a famous line from a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt.

“As engineers, the work we do inspires us, but the ability to share that inspiration and engage the public—that’s always in the back of my head,” Clark says. “It seemed like a worthwhile message to get out there.” As this Mars mission continues, Clark is already busy preparing for the next one, which will launch later this decade to retrieve the samples from the surface of Mars. He says he’s excited to build the next generation of missions that will “dare even mightier things."

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