Research threatened in NASA craft crash

By Guy Gugliotta
The Washington Post

AP The Genesis space capsule, which had orbited the sun to find clues about the solar system's origin, crashed to Earth yesterday.

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Scientists said the crash breached a canister containing more than 200 ceramic tiles inside the 450-pound capsule, exposing the principal payload to atmospheric contamination and likely reducing the tiles to shards.

Nevertheless, experts said solar particles embedded in the tiles may eventually be salvaged.

"This is not the worst case; the capsule could have crashed into a mountain," said Andrew Dantzler, NASA's solar system division director. "There is still hope for a science result from this mission."

Helicopter stunt pilots waiting to pluck the parachuting Genesis out of the sky in a spectacular midair recovery instead watched helplessly as the discus-shaped capsule smashed into the ground at 193 mph and sank to its midsection in high desert of the Army's Dugway Proving Ground.

"There was a big pit in my stomach," said physicist Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designed the atom collector plates. "This just wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces."

The two stunt helicopters and an accompanying U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter landed at the crash site a few minutes later so experts could photograph the capsule, assess damage and make plans on when and how to bring it to Dugway's Michael Army Air Field.

Chris Jones, director of solar-system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said engineers had a contingency plan to cope with the crash and expected to bring the tile canister, if not the entire capsule, back to the airfield for disassembly in a special clean room.

The principal early concern was to disarm a mortar charge and five other pyrotechnic devices whose failure to explode — possibly because of faulty batteries — prevented Genesis' parachutes from deploying and led to the crash.

Roy Haggard, a member of the helicopter recovery team, said the capsule itself and a canister within had cracked open, but "it was actually quite surprising how little damage there was."

Genesis was launched three years ago and spent 850 days with the tiles exposed to the solar wind to collect atoms representing all the elements and isotopes of the periodic table.
 
The particles — a few micrograms of the sun's primordial stuff — were expected to tell scientists the composition of the solar system when it formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Regardless of the scientific outcome, the capsule's disastrous descent put a blemish on NASA's highly regarded unmanned space science program, which this year has seen major successes with its two Mars landers and the insertion of the Cassini spacecraft into orbit around Saturn.

The crash also raised questions about the prospects of NASA's new generation of "sample return" missions.

Genesis was the first human-made vehicle to bring matter back from space since the moon missions of the 1970s, and it is to be followed by the re-entry early next year of the Stardust, carrying particles from a comet's tail, and eventually by a Mars sample return.

"The space business has humbled us," said Firouz Naderi, NASA's Mars exploration and program manager. "We will be increasingly bringing samples back, and we will figure out what went wrong here and proceed."

Quote from Roger Wiens was provided by The Associated Press