Nasa’s Solar Project Ends in Desert Crash

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 yesterday after its parachute failed to deploy. The fridge sized capsule spiralled out of the sky and thundered into the Utah desert.

It was not immediately known whether the cosmic samples had been destroyed. Nasa officials believed the fragile disks that held the atoms would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute.

‘We’re going to get the pieces out,’ said Roger Wiens, a payload leader for Los Alamos National Laboratory. ‘It’s going to be a lot tougher to sort out the pieces of broken material.’

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

The capsule was returning after more than three years in space as part of six-year projectthat cost pounds 145 million. 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 analyse 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.

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.