It Came From the Sun!

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah - The Genesis space capsule, which had orbited the
sun for more than three years in an attempt to find clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed
to Earth on Wednesday after its parachute failed to deploy.

It wasn't immediately known whether cosmic samples it was
carrying back as part of a six-year, $260 million project had
been destroyed. NASA (news - web sites) officials believed
the fragile disks that held the atoms would shatter even if the
capsule hit the ground with a parachute.

"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."

Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off in helicopters to hook
the parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule — holding a
set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected
from solar wind — hit the desert floor without the parachute
opening.

The impact drove the capsule halfway underground. NASA
engineers feared the explosive for the parachute might still
be alive and ready to fire, keeping helicopter crews at bay.

"That presents a safety hazard to recovery crews," said Chris
Jones, solar system exploration director for NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory

The copters were supposed to snatch the capsule's parachute
with a hook as it floated down at 400 feet a minute, or more
than 6 feet per second. But the capsule tumbled out of
control. It was supposed to be spinning at 15 revolutions a
minute to slice evenly through the atmosphere, but camera
images showed it tumbling instead.

Scientists hoped the capsule's charged atoms — a "billion
billion" of them — would reveal clues about the origin and
evolution of our solar system, said Don Burnett, Genesis
principal investigator and a nuclear geochemist at California
Institute of Technology.

"We have for years wanted to know the composition of the
sun," Burnett said before the crash. He said scientists had
expected to analyze the material "one atom at a time."

Genesis had been moving in tandem with Earth outside its
magnetic shield on three orbits of the sun.

Cliff Fleming, the lead helicopter pilot, and backup pilot
Dan Rudert had replicated the retrieval in dozens of practice
runs. Fleming and Rudert, stunt pilots by trade, were drafted
for the mission because of their expertise flying high and capturing objects. Fleming has swooped
after sky surfers in the action movie "XXX" and towed actor Pierce Brosnan through the air in
"Dante's Peak." He just worked on "Batman 4."

The Genesis mission, launched in 2001, marked the first time NASA has collected any objects
from farther than the moon for retrieval to Earth, said Roy Haggard, Genesis' flight operations chief
and CEO of Vertigo Inc., which designed the capture system.

Together, the charged atoms captured over 884 days on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire,
diamond and silicone were no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that would be
enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of planets.

Scientists had expected to study the material for five more years.