An open edition rug that bridges humankind’s most ancient weaving method with one of today’s most technologically advanced fabrics.

When NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars in 2021, keen-eyed enthusiasts across the globe quickly began decoding the pattern on its parachute. The encoded pattern was discovered to read “dare mighty things,” alluding to a now famous speech by American president Teddy Roosevelt in 1899. In binary code, Red = 1 and White = 0, with each of the concentric rings representing one of the words. The zeros and ones need to be split into blocks of ten characters… and from there, adding 64 gives you the ASCII code for a letter.

While the challenge to decode the parachute design raised interest in the landing, the graphic also served a practical purpose: to allow NASA engineers to understand the angle of the Perseverance Rover upon landing on Mars.

The high-tech woven fabric used to make the parachute was produced by Heathcoat Fabrics in Devon, UK. “Decel Air Superlight” took over 15 years to develop and is described as “the lightest, strongest, and most heat-resilient parachute fabric” in existence.

In tribute to the extraordinary technical weaving achievements of the parachute, we created “Dare mighty things” – a hand knotted rug produced in legendary Agra, India, by some of our most highly skilled weavers.