re: Yeah, I'd call that "augered in".
I'm not sure why NASA is so keen on parasails, but they seem to have been obsessed with them at least since the X-38. Parasails are fun to pilot (I've jumped them many times), but they are *much* less reliable to deploy than plain old round chutes. There's no we I'd ever jump a parasail without a backup.
That said, it looks like a pyro failure of some sort, so I suppose that a different kind of chute wouldn't have made a difference. :-(
Nathan.
