Today, Mars probe "Beagle 2" landed on the red planet -- but no-one is yet sure if it arrived intact and functional. As the BBC wrote a few days ago, a Mars landing is a pretty dicey affair. To figure out if the Beagle 2 is operating, the British scientists who created the probe designed it to send a signal back to Earth -- so right now, they're anxiously sitting by the radio telescopes waiting to hear it.

The signal? According to the BBC:

Confirmation of a safe landing would come in the form of a nine-note musical signal from the craft, written by the British pop band Blur.

Okay, that officially -- and quite precisely -- rocks. Apparently, the Blur guys are quite the math geeks, because in an interview with The Scotsman, the bass player Alex James explained that their tune was based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical pattern that occurs in nature, and in which each number is the sum of the previous two. The sequence goes like this: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, etc. The pattern can be spied in everything from the spirals of sea shells to the shape of pine cones.

As James put it:

“We were given a lot less limitations doing Beagle 2 than you get in a standard music industry contract. It didn’t have to be catchy or anything."

Blur actually used the tune on the B-side of their single "No Distance Left to Run".