18 Ways NASA Uses Pi [Video]

While no Mars landing is exactly the same, they do share one thing in common: parachutes. Slowing down a rover or lander as it drops through the thin Martian atmosphere is imperative if engineers hope to slow the spacecraft enough to give the descent rockets time for a soft landing. NASA’s engineers take all sorts of things into consideration when designing a parachute: the mass and velocity of the spacecraft, the elevation of the landing site and the density of the atmosphere, just to name a few. Pi helps engineers determine how big the parachute needs to be in order to generate the drag needed …