posted 06-17-2021 09:58 AM               

NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, includes a trackable code, making Perseverance a geocaching game piece. The front of this geocoin is a replica of the unique glass disk that contains that tracking code: the rover’s calibration target. The first image of this target beamed back to Earth on March 17, 2021 when Perseverance "took a selfie" with one of its on-board cameras.

The instrument team who worked on these devices enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes theme so much that they embedded several other references. Do you know the significance of 221BBAKER? Can you understand those dancing people?

They also have other Mars-related items, including patches, marbles, and other "trackables." The definition of trackable, by the way, simply means an item has a unique six-character code, to be used if the item is retrieved from or added to a geocache (although I don't recommend doing that).

posted 06-17-2021 10:18 AM               

"If somebody is up there, walking around Mars eventually — well, if you've done geocaching before, it's cool to have this thing out there where people could come up and then geocache later on," Beegle told collectSPACE.

On Earth, geocaching is an outdoor, treasure hunt-like pastime where participants use GPS-enabled devices to locate geocache targets hidden by others. Beegle and his team discovered they enjoyed the activity during the course of developing the SHERLOC instrument, so they made a geocache tag for future discovery by astronauts on Mars.