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Under 30 mins
Whether it’s sending spacecraft to other planets, driving rovers on Mars, finding out what planets are made of or how deep alien oceans are, pi takes us far at NASA. Here are just some of the ways pi helps us explore space.
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Parachuting on Mars
Parachuting on Mars
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 …