re: Some strange stories floating around about MER-A's EDL
So, if I understand this correctly, it was waiting for the deceleration rate to drop to a certain level (after it had peaked) to indicate the dynamic pressure is safe. It sounds like from what you wrote that the deceleration rate never got low enough and it eventually said, "screw this" and opened the parachute anyway...
Doesn't this mean that it opened the parachute with more dynamic pressure then expected and stressed the parachute?
Do you know how the computer made this decision? Was it from a backup timer or maybe altitude estimation from IMU data?