If you were planning on building these for something where the cost of the parachute would actually matter, and need to do so at scale, perhaps you'd switch to a single-color parachute (with simple orientation/tracking markings). This discussion isn't really interesting at all.
The color of the parachute? It was probably not even a line item. As a sibling comment pointed out, they'd still would've colored it in a way that helped with tracking and orientation.
They couldn't say "34.20 N 118.17 W", which would indicate they're talking about the whole campus and industrial park it's in, because that's only 6 words.
Instead, by defining it to a precision of one arcsecond, they imply that JPL is located within the 30-by-25-meter rectangle [2] between 34°11'58.5"N 118°10'31.5"W and 34°11'57.5"N 118°10'30.5"W, which is basically a turnaround and associated parking lot island.
[1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2170/ [2] Rectangular [3] because the circle around the earth at higher latitudes is smaller than the circle at the equator. [3] OK, approximately rectangular. It's rectangular on a Mercator projection map!
Not true, according to OP:
> Allen Chen revealed that there was a code hidden in the parachute, as well as the markings being useful for camera alignment.
[1] https://twitter.com/adithya_balaji/status/136402008259946087...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachu...
[3] https://twitter.com/steltzner/status/1364076615932645379?s=2...
If you think parsing that sentence is insane: exactly.
