Pounds 150m Hole in the Sand ; Nasa’s Bid to Grab Space Capsule Ends in Disaster

THE vision was of a spectacular Hollywood-style finale to a Pounds 150 million space voyage. The reality was rather different.

Scientists across the world watched excitedly as a Nasa capsule carrying particles of the solar wind headed earthwards after a 20million-mile mission of discovery.

What was supposed to happen next was that a parachute would open, slowing its fall to just 10mph, so a helicopter stunt pilot with an 18ft hooked pole attached to his landing skid could manoeuvre close enough to snag the chute and lower the priceless cargo gently to the ground.

But the parachute failed to open, rendering the pilot redundant and leaving the capsule to freefall to earth at 190mph and crash- land in the Utah desert.

It was a crushing blow to the Nasa experts waiting to analyse the samples, collected during an orbit of Lagrange point 1, where the gravity of the earth and the Sun are balanced.

It was hoped that by analysing the composition of our solar system, they would be able to uncover the chemical processes which led to its formation four and a half billion years ago.

Last night it was revealed that the canister had been broken open by the impact, meaning the contents were likely to be contaminated.

British scientists who were due to take part in the analysis of the ‘stardust’ put a brave face on things, insisting it was still possible that they could be salvaged.

Pictures of the unscheduled landing, in a military-controlled area of the Great Salt Desert some 50 miles south-west of Salt Lake City, were broadcast live on Nasa’s own TV station.

It must have made painful viewing for Professor Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist who led Britain’s doomed Beagle 2 mission to Mars. He had been consulted on the development of the capsule’s hexagon- shaped ‘wafers’ used to capture the particles and was due to take part in their analysis.

Professor Pillinger said the science samples should have been opened up only in a clean room.

‘There could be fragments that still contain some kind of scientific information,’ he told the BBC.

‘But the contamination from the desert is going to be a killer.’ His colleague Dr Ian Franchi said: ‘We are very disappointed.

But the samples are here on the ground. They are probably not in the condition we would have anticipated and we will have a lot more work to do to get rid of any contamination from the earth.

‘But it could have been worse the capsule could have burnt up before reaching Earth.’ The capsule spent more than three years in space attached to the Genesis spacecraft before detaching from its mother ship ahead of yesterday’s re-entry.

Earlier in the day scientists had confidently predicted that the landing would be a success. They hailed the pedigree of the two pilots on standby one was Cliff Fleming who towed Pierce Brosnan through the air in the film Dante’s Peak and said both had pulled off the stunt successfully every time in practice.

The last time that samples of the solar system were brought to earth was during Nasa’s Apollo missions in the 1970s.

But the latest project was the first time ever that atoms captured from beyond the moon were to be analysed.