NASA Probe Crashes in Utah Desert
A NASA capsule bearing precious atomic specimens that two Hollywood stunt pilots were prepared to catch as it came into Earth’s atmosphere crashed into the Utah desert Wednesday after a parachute that was to supposed to slow its fall failed to deploy.
It was not clear immediately whether the crash destroyed the probe’s cargo: bits of solar matter painstakingly collected over two years that could provide scientists with clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system.
Television showed the capsule, an inflated disc slightly smaller than a car, hurtling through the air, then crashing into the desert.
As the capsule lay half-submerged in the hot sand, its round casing cracked open, investigators approached gingerly, circling the probe before they began taking photographs.
The plans for a derring-do capture had enlisted the help of two Hollywood stunt pilots who had practiced their mission for five years after military pilots declined to attempt the rescue. The pilots of the two helicopters were prepared to use a giant hook to latch onto the probe’s parachute as it slowly descended to Earth.
The probe’s cargo is the first extraterrestrial material that NASA has brought back to Earth since Apollo 17 astronauts collected rocks from the Moon in 1972. Scientists hoped the material will tell them about the solar system’s primordial building materials of gas and dust that later turned into planets.
Launched in 2001, the probe traveled 930,000 miles to a point where gravitational forces of the Earth and the sun cancel out. There, it deployed 55 hexagonal plates made of a variety of materials and waited as bits of solar wind: charged atoms, traveling about a million miles per hour, or 1.6 million kilometers per hour, that the Sun continually spews out embedded themselves in the plates.
After 850 days of collecting, Genesis packed up in April and headed back toward Earth. But scientists had to make sure the material was protected as it made its way back after the capsule detached from the probe, called Genesis.
The two helicopters were waiting in the air over the landing target, an ellipse 23 miles long and 15 miles wide at the army’s Dugway Proving Ground.