18 Ways NASA Uses Pi

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. Find out how pi helps us explore space.

Client: NASA JPL Education

The Brief: To expand the reach of our Pi Day campaign, I developed this article in collaboration with JPL’s K–12 education specialists, Ota Lutz and Lyle Tavernier. By translating math problems from our annual Pi Day Challenge into a story format, we created a piece that appealed to audiences beyond the classroom and boosted engagement across both the challenge and the campaign.

Excerpt:

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 to slow down.

Exploring New Worlds

Scientists use pi to search for exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our own Sun. Powerful ground- and space-based telescopes track how much light is emitted by distant stars. When a planet passes in front of its star, the telescope sees a dip in the amount of light emitted. Knowing the percentage of this decrease and the formula for the area of a circle, scientists can deduce the planet’s size.