Watch the skies!

[Mephisto2]

Solar capsule crashes into Earth
A Nasa space capsule carrying captured particles blown off the Sun has crashed back to Earth in the Utah desert after its parachutes failed to open.

The $264m Genesis mission spent more than two years gathering the solar material to help scientists understand the origin of the Sun and the planets.

Hollywood stunt pilots had been waiting to catch the capsule in midair to give its cargo a special soft landing.

The US space agency is now setting up a review board to study what went wrong.

Officials said it would be some time before they knew if some, or any, of the science could be recovered.

"We estimate that the capsule hit the ground at about 193mph (310km/h)," said Chris Jones, director of Solar System exploration at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Roy Haggard, who led the helicopter retrieval team, was one of the first on the site of the crash. He found the Genesis capsule half-buried in the ground.

"The canister was slightly breached - just a few inches - due to the high velocity impact," he said. "It appeared also that the science canister inside had been breached a few inches."

The Genesis spacecraft ejected the sample container on time at 1153GMT (1253BST) at a distance of more than 60,000km from Earth. It was on a perfect trajectory and it entered the atmosphere as planned at 1554GMT (1654BST).

Controllers clapped and cheered when their long-range cameras spotted the 190kg (420lbs) capsule in the high atmosphere.

But they expected to see the incoming container being slowed by its drogue and decelerated further by a main chute. Instead, they had to watch a tumbling silver disc head for a violent impact with the desert floor.

The capsule struck the ground just before 1600GMT (1700BST), a full 15 minutes before it was due to be pulled from the skies in a controlled manoeuvre by the helicopter pilots.

"There are a lot of things that had to happen in series and we got just about all of them done and we just did not get the last two or three done," said Genesis project manager Don Sweetnam.

"There is still hope for a science result for this mission," he added optimistically.

Earthly contamination

The Genesis probe was supposed to mark the first return of extraterrestrial matter by human means since the 1970s, when Moon rocks were carried back to Earth by manned US Apollo and unmanned Soviet Luna missions.

Genesis 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 - a billion, billion of them - that had been blown off the Sun.

The precise nature of these atoms were to 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 have analysed some of the Genesis samples, said the situation looked grave because the science samples should have been opened up only in a clean-room.

"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."

And OU colleague Dr Ian Franchi feared the wafers would have been shattered, making it difficult for any clean samples to be recovered: "Picking out the fragments that we want is the problem because there're many different types of fragment; and different types of material from different parts of the solar wind.

"They come off the solar wind in different regimes; we need to know what we're analysing."

I have two things to say.

1) - What a bummer.

2) - I wonder if anything nasty leaked out? :-)

Sounds like an old 50's SciFi movie!

NASA spends so much money on these kinds of experiments. Do you ever wonder if the money could be better spent on social programs?



Mr Mephisto

[stonegrody]

That's a shame. I feel it's money well spent. It's important for us to understand the universe around us. There are so many clues out there that give us a glimpse to how it all began and how it all might end. I'll keep my opinions to myself about social programs. That would be a whole other thread.

[Glory's Sun]

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=68356

[Sp0rAdiC]

That is too bad. The whole money going towards other things issue, I think we should figure out our ocean's first, before flying to the sun and grabbing space dust or w/e. The knowledge of deep sea life would be a lot more useful to the whole science community.

[mirevolver]

This is one of the leftover programs of the previous NASA administration's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" policy that will continue to haunt NASA until the last of those programs is complete. That policy resulted in numerous failuers due to the fact that they often cut corners in order to cut costs and this is just one more failure to the list.

I'm all for privitizing the space program, I think it would lead to better innovations and faster progress into space. But the problem would be finding corporations that would see profit in space, and any that do see profit in going to space would have to look on a long term scale and not expect any short term ROI (Return on Investment). And as far as freeing up money for social programs, on the overall scale it wouldn't add that much to the government budget. As it stands now, $0.01 per tax dollar goes to NASA. Back in the 1960's when the moon race was on NASA recieved $0.04 per tax dollar.

[ForgottenKnight]

It's really a shame that the project that had gone so well had to have a tragic ending.
It's not NASA causing the cutbacks, but the politics governing the country in decreasing the budget for NASA to less than 1% of the federal governement. That means that NASA is not getting $0.01 of every tax dollar, but is actually getting slightly less! Social programs on the otherhand are already taking up most of that tax dollar as it is! Why not give some money from dieing social programs that do us no good, such as social security, and give that money to NASA? At least then there will be some results from it. Any money going down the drain from a crash landing of a NASA probe provides more of a result than most of these so called social programs.

[Stare At The Sun]

i'd rather see money spent on rockets and probes that go to space, then weapons tests and DOD bullshit.

I'd rather see the 80 billion we invested in iraq, to go to establishing a base on the moon, and pushing the boundries of mankind forward. Instead of putting us back into another war. Especially, one we can't truly win.

Simple facts, we need NASA, they are going to play a huge part in our future, and the sooner we accept that, and give them the funding they deserve, the faster we can evolve as a society. In just a few short years, we went from unmaned tennis ball sized orbiters, to a 3 man mission to the moon. With proper funding we could set our sights on the moon, and mars.

I might have an idealistc view of it, but if we were to set our sights on the heavens, and work w/ other countries, as we do w/ the ISS, we could achieve far more.

[ForgottenKnight]

Originally Posted by Stare At The Sun

i'd rather see money spent on rockets and probes that go to space, then weapons tests and DOD bullshit.

I'd rather see the 80 billion we invested in iraq, to go to establishing a base on the moon, and pushing the boundries of mankind forward. Instead of putting us back into another war. Especially, one we can't truly win.

Simple facts, we need NASA, they are going to play a huge part in our future, and the sooner we accept that, and give them the funding they deserve, the faster we can evolve as a society. In just a few short years, we went from unmaned tennis ball sized orbiters, to a 3 man mission to the moon. With proper funding we could set our sights on the moon, and mars.

I might have an idealistc view of it, but if we were to set our sights on the heavens, and work w/ other countries, as we do w/ the ISS, we could achieve far more.

AMEN BROTHER!!! YEAH! THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!

SUPPORT OUR FUTURE, SUPPORT NASA!!!