Crash of Genesis Disappoints ; but Some Wafers Holding Solar Data May Have Survived
The dreams of hundreds of scientists and engineers crashed on the salt flats Wednesday, when NASA’s Denver- built Genesis capsule failed to deploy its parachutes and slammed into the desert floor at 193 mph.
Genesis held hundreds of fragile silicon wafers embedded with microscopic bits of the sun’s surface. They were precious cargo, collected during the spacecraft’s three-year, $264 million mission to unlock mysteries of the solar system’s formation.
Many of those wafers were likely smashed to bits during the impact. But mission scientists expressed hope they can salvage some data by piecing the shattered wafers back together, like a giant, jagged jigsaw puzzle.
Genesis Project scientists said late Wednesday night, after inspecting the damaged capsule, that some of the wafers appear to be intact.
Genesis was built and controlled at Lockheed Martin Space System’s Waterton Canyon facility in Jefferson County. The aerospace company was also in charge of safely returning the solar samples to Earth.
About 200 of the company’s Jefferson County employees worked on Genesis.
“It’s a big disappointment, and we’re very saddened by it,” said Jim Crocker, the company’s vice president for civil space.
“It’s a very unforgiving business,” he said. “You can do a million things right, and then one thing goes wrong. But that’s the nature of the business.”
Early speculation on a possible cause focused on the capsule’s battery.
The battery supplies electricity that ignites a series of small explosive charges, called pyros. Two of the pyros trigger a mortar that deploys the first of two parachutes, called a drogue.
The capsule’s battery had experienced overheating problems throughout the mission, said Bob Corwin, Genesis recovery team chief for Lockheed Martin.
“The battery is a possible cause of not firing the first pyro,” Corwin said. “And if the first one doesn’t fire, the rest in the sequence won’t.”
Though Lockheed Martin built the Genesis return capsule, the company bought the parachutes, pyros and battery from various suppliers. Crocker said Wednesday he didn’t know the names of those suppliers.
And he stressed that it is too soon to point a finger at the battery. Various sensors and a computer also play a role in firing the pyros and releasing the parachutes, for example.
Crocker was one of several hundred invited guests who watched the capsule’s final moments on a large-screen television in a cavernous hangar at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds, several miles from the landing site and about 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
The spectators had gathered to see a dramatic midair helicopter capture. A hook-bellied helicopter was to snag the capsule’s multicolored parachute thousands of feet above the desert. The capture would mark NASA’s first return of samples from space since the final Apollo manned lunar mission in 1972.
But the mood in the hangar went from boisterous celebration to stunned silence in a few seconds. Applause and cheers erupted when the crowd caught sight of the capsule around 9:55 a.m.; the noise died when people noticed it was tumbling end over end – apparently out of control – without a parachute.
“There’s a pit in my stomach. It’s a real disappointment,” said Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His team spent several years building three of the Genesis science instruments.
“We’re going to get analyses and a lot of results out of this, I’m sure of that,” Wiens said. “But how dirty the samples are and how broken up they are, we’ll just have to see.”
A mishap review board will be formed within 72 hours to investigate the failure, said Andrew Dantzler, solar system division director at NASA. It could take months to determine the cause.
The midair capture was designed to prevent damage that could have occurred if the Genesis parachute was allowed to float to the ground at 9 mph. Instead, the 5-foot-diameter capsule struck at a speed more than 20 times greater – an estimated 193 mph, according to Chris Jones, director for solar system exploration at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
When it hit, the capsule tipped on its side and buried itself about 2 feet beneath the surface, said Roy Haggard, of Vertigo Inc., who was in the lead helicopter.
Haggard said the capsule’s outer shell appeared cracked. Inside, the cylindrical aluminum canister that holds the brittle wafers also appeared to be breached – “but only a few inches,” he said during an afternoon news conference.
“They’re probably pretty busted up,” said Joe Vellinga, Lockheed Martin’s program manager for Genesis, of the all-important wafers. “But if they’re contained, then science can still be extracted – just with a lot more difficulty.”
Workers from NASA and Lockheed Martin spent much of the afternoon digging out the capsule and removing the canister.
About 5:30 p.m. MDT, a Blackhawk military helicopter transported the canister from the crash site to a temporary clean room at Dugway.
The canister was uncovered in a preparation room outside the clean room Wednesday night. The 3-foot-wide aluminum cylinder was crushed and twisted, and technicians used tweezers to pick bits of mud and foil from its interior.
During a brief media tour of the preparation room, Genesis program scientist David Lindstrom said some of the prized wafers appear to be intact.
“It looks as though there are some that didn’t break at all,” Lindstrom said.
Carlton Allen, astromaterials curator from NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said it will take three to four days at Dugway to clean the canister, document the damage and prepare it for shipment to Houston.
From there, the battered capsule will be trucked to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
For Lockheed Martin, the Genesis failure revives memories of two failed NASA Mars missions in 1999. In September of that year, a math conversion error caused Climate Orbiter to burn up in the Mars atmosphere.
In December 1999, Polar Lander went silent minutes before its scheduled landing and was never heard from again. Engineers believe the craft’s main engine shut down early, causing the probe to fall to the surface and crash.
Wednesday’s failure also raises questions about the fate of another Lockheed-built NASA spacecraft, Stardust. That probe was launched in 1999 and collected samples of comet dust from Comet Wild 2 in January.
It is scheduled to parachute onto the Utah Test and Training Range in January 2006. Stardust uses the “same general design” for its drogue parachute system, said Lockheed Martin space scientist Ben Clark.
“For Stardust, the die is cast,” said Don Sevilla, NASA’s Genesis payload team leader.
“We need to understand the root cause (of the Genesis failure), because it may help us prepare for the Stardust re-entry,” he said.
The Genesis capsule, bearing billions of solar atoms captured on hundreds of silicon wafers, entered the atmosphere over Oregon about 9:53 a.m., streaking at 24,706 mph. High-powered cameras picked it up a few minutes later, as it sped toward the Utah test range.
The drogue parachute, which provides stability during the initial atmospheric descent, was supposed to open at 108,000 feet. At 22,000 feet, the main parafoil chute was supposed to open.
Until the parachutes failed, the capsule was on course and appeared to be operating as expected.
INFOBOX
Mission statement
29 months the Genesis spacecraft spent on its mission to the sun to collect data.
193 mph: The speed at which Genesis crashed into a Utah desert.
$264 million: Cost of the mission to help unlock the mysteries of the solar system.
200 employees at the Jefferson County Lockheed Martin plant participated in the Genesis project.
* What are solar wind particles?
Pieces of the sun’s outer layer that are the mass of a few grains of sand.
* What did scientists hope to find by studying the particles?
Scientists believe the planets and moons were formed when gas, dust and ice from a collapsed solar nebula bumped around in space and eventually stuck to each other. That transition from dust to planets could be revealed in those particles.