Post by Salem6 on Sept 8, 2004 16:56:06 GMT
A capsule from the Genesis probe, which has been gathering particles blown off the Sun, has crashed back to Earth.
The capsule entered the atmosphere as planned at 1555GMT (1655BST) but its drogue parachute failed to open.
The Genesis capsule will be recovered
Hollywood stunt pilots had been waiting to catch the capsule in midair to give its cargo a special soft landing.
The particles of solar wind in the capsule were being sought by scientists to help them understand the origin and evolution of the Sun and the planets.
"It appears that it hit the ground at about 100 mph (161 km/h)," said Chris Jones, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
He said it might take some time to recover the capsule from the Utah desert floor because charges used to deploy the drogue could still be live.
Delicate wafers
The capsule impacted with such force that it dug itself into the ground. From aerial pictures taken by chasing helicopters it is clear the pod has sustained severe damage.
The Capsule was seen to tumble to Earth
The return of the Genesis probe was supposed to mark the first bits of extraterrestrial matter retrieved from space by human means since the 1970s, when Moon rocks were carried back to Earth by manned US Apollo and unmanned Soviet Luna missions.
The $264m Genesis mission was launched in 2001. It carried delicate hexagonal wafers of pure silicon, gold, sapphire, diamond and other materials.
These were hung outside the probe for more than 800 days, sifting space for 10-20 micrograms of atoms that had been blown off the Sun.
Earthly contamination
The precise nature of these atoms could have told scientists how the Sun and the nine major planets grew out of a huge cloud of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago.
Professor Colin Pillinger, of the UK's Open University, which was to analyse some of the Genesis samples, said the mission looked lost.
"The outer part of the spacecraft is carbon fibre and that is very resilient - it is basically in one piece," he told the BBC.
"There could be fragments inside there that still contained some kind of scientific information. But the contamination from the desert is going to be a killer at the end of the day for the scientists."
Video:-
The BBC's Fergus Walsh
"It'll be the first time since 1972... that Nasa will have brought back samples from space"
news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/40048000/rm/_40048750_genesis13_walsh08_vi.ram
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3638926.stm