24 FEBRUARY 2021 When NASA's Perseverance rover made its daring descent to the red planet, you may have noticed that its parachute bore an unusual arrangement of red and white chevrons. That pattern, it turns out, was not random at all, but a hidden code. Within just six hours, internet sleuths had cracked it, revealing a beautifully uplifting message: "Dare Mighty Things". The phrase has been used as the motto by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for years, taken from a speech delivered by American president Theodore Roosevelt in 1899: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."