Apparently the pattern on the Perserverance lander parachute is encoded in ASCII. How does ASCII work, and how does that encryption in color translate to text?
In: Mathematics
ASCII is basically just a mapping of characters (like ‘A’) to numbers (specifically numbers that are can be represented by 8 binary bits, which are the numbers between 0 and 255). For example, ‘A’ is represented with the number 65 (which when written in binary is 01000001).
The benefit of ASCII is that it lets you write text anywhere you have two things you can use to represent 0 and 1, like wires being on or off in a computer, or, say, alternating colors on a parachute pattern.
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