NASA Mars Rover Perseverance Cross Stitch Pattern "Percy" Tribute Stitch - instant PDF Download

Those sentimental nerds over at JPL had one more surprise in store for us when we saw the footage from Perseverance landing on the surface of Mars: a hidden message encoded in the EDL parachute. There are four layers of data containing binary code for (from center to edge): Dare, Mighty, Things, and 34 11 58 N 118 10 31 W (the coordinates for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories). 

In honor of Perseverance (which we're calling Percy, deal with it), I had to create this pattern as soon as I learned about this.

The quote is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." These three words are also the title of a series of books about a girl whose dream it is to go to space, so I find it hard to believe that there was not also a feminist undertone to the word choice. 

My pattern depicts the EDL sequence for Perseverance (with some creative license on my part for the sake of compression).  It's designed to look good on dark colored aida, and fit an 8x10 frame on 14ct aida. 

Details:

Perseverance:
Formats: 4 PDFs:

• 1pg color+symbols for digital devices
• 2 pg color+symbols for printing
• 2 pg symbols-only with contrasting backstitch

Size: 133x101 stitches (see images for sizing on different fabric counts)
Stitches used: full X, ¾, backstitch
Colors: 12 DMC Colors
Difficulty: ⚫⚪⚪⚪⚪ Easy to Moderate

Special thanks to Margie and Wendy for their test stitch photos.