Space Age Easter Eggs

Unfortunately, Hogwarts is not real.  But, if you look carefully, there are a few places where real magic has occurred regularly.  Menlo Park, Bell Labs, Cern, Cavendish Labs, The Skunkworks, and one of my favorites, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, regularly produce very real magic.

As the author Arthur C. Clarke famously said, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. 

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has an interesting past, dating back to a handful of nerdy students and a friendly professor at Caltech back in the 1930’s, who were known as “the Suicide Squad” for their habit of small explosions (and the occasional fire in their dorm rooms).  These eccentric geniuses were obsessed with rocketry, which was then considered junk science.

Despite the disdain of the rest of the scientists, the Suicide Squad kept trying to perfect a liquid propellant for their rockets, (many of those fuels spontaneously combusted when mixed).  Though no one was seriously hurt, Caltech banished such experiments on campus but provided three remote acres in a place call Arroyo Seco.  Since there was nothing in that dry gully, the Suicide Squad was free to conduct its& research.  Finally free to do whatever they wanted, they thrived.  Eventually, they stopped blowing up the gully—mostly—and the rockets flew—mostly.

When World War II started, the Suicide Boys worked for the US Army, developing Jet-Assisted Takeoff (JATO) and they became a government installation run by Caltech.  When the war ended, they were the scientists who worked with Von Braun to launch V-2 rockets here in New Mexico.  (If you ever get a chance, there is a great museum at the  White Sands Missile Range post, where you can see one of the remaining V-2 rockets.)

After the Russians launched Sputnik, JPL became part of NASA and has been incredibly active ever since.  These are the people who design the rovers that have successfully landed on the moon (and lately, Mars), who built the Voyager spacecraft, and who also built the helicopter that flew on Mars.

Less well-known, JPL’s population is also the people with a sense of humor that put Easter Eggs on their spacecraft.  Let me give you an example:

When the Perseverance rover was landing on Mars, it landed with a multicolor parachute.  A camera on the top of the rover sent back a magnificent photo, but few realized that the pattern in the parachute was actually binary code that spelled out, "DarJPL's motto from a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt, a long with the GPS coordinates of JPL's headquarters in Pasadena, California.  Also aboard the rover was a tiny sliver of a piece of Martian meteorite that had landed on Earth.  The JPL decided that it should be the first object to make a roundtrip journey back to Mars.

Then there was the calibration target on the 2018 Insider rover.  A calibration target helps the rover’s camera adjust for color and adjust for distortion.  JPL followed NASA’s instructions, and carefully hid in the border the Braille code for “JPL.”  A few years later on a different rover, they glued a 1909 Lincoln Penny onto the calibration target.  This was JPL’s way of referencing the habit of geologists placing a coin next to rocks before taking photographs of their samples.

My favorite JPL Easter Egg has to be the wheels of the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars.  On previous rovers, JPL had noticed that it was difficult to determine just how far a rover had moved as it traveled because the rover’s wheels sometimes slipped on the loose dusty surface of Mars.  The instruments could accurately measure how many revolutions the wheels had turned, but not how far the rover had actually traveled.

JPL quickly came up with a solution.  The metal wheels of Curiosity would have the letters ”JPL” stamped on them so on each revolution of the wheels, the letters would be stamped into the Martian dust.  Then the camera could take a photo of the tracks, in a sense creating a visual odometer.  Scientists on earth could compare the travel distance recorded on the instruments to the travel distance shown in the tracks.

NASA loved the low-tech solution for coming up with accurate travel measurements, but was a little wary of all the photos from Mars advertising JPL.  Those photos were going to be seen by the whole world.  Reading the correspondence between the two agencies concerning this, you get the idea that if the wheels had spelled out “NASA”, there wouldn’t have been a problem. 

In the end, JPL agreed to just put a distinctive pattern of squares and rectangles on the tires, something that would show up well on the photos.  NASA agreed.

Shortly before launch, NASA finally realized that the “square and rectangle holes” were actually dots and dashes that in Morse code spelled out “JPL.”  By then it was too late to change the tires.  As I write this, the Curiosity rover is still working, years after its projected lifespan, and is still leaving its secret message on the surface of Mars.