ORIGINAL CONTENT

In 2021, NASA landed their Perseverance rover on Mars. Within the pattern of this parachute, there was a hidden and encoded message. This was widely covered by global media. NASA rarely hides codes (known as Easter Eggs) in their missions, but when they do, they are well hidden; they need to be decoded and then a meaning found. 

In 2022, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission launched. Through a series of further missions, this will eventually lead to the construction of the first base camp on the Moon. Towards the end of a pre-launch video, a new and more complex encoded parachute supported the Orion module. Was NASA at it again? 

Finding and solving this hidden code was easy compared with trying to find out who was responsible for creating it. Did NASA even know that someone had embedded an Easter Egg in footage about their high-profile mission to return to the Moon? 

The more I looked into it, the more I came to appreciate how mysterious this Easter Egg was, and I became determined to tackle and solve it. Little did I know that it would turn out to be intriguing, infuriating and fascinating in equal measure.