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NASA Scientists Hopeful After Peeking into What's Left of Genesis Capsule

Posted on: Sunday, 12 September 2004, 06:00 CDT

After peering into the fractured Genesis space capsule with the help of mirrors and flashlights, NASA scientists expressed new optimism Friday that its shaken cargo will still yield valuable data about the origins of the solar system.

"We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals," said physicist Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a conference call with reporters.

"Today we are more encouraged than we were yesterday," said Gentry Lee, chief engineer of planetary flight systems at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The materials we sought are in hand. They don't look the way we wanted them to, but they are here."

The Genesis spacecraft remained in a temporary "clean room" Friday at Dugway Proving Ground, two days after its parachutes failed to open and it crash-landed in Utah's west desert. Scientists said they will examine the capsule at Dugway through the weekend before shipping its precious collector plates to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The capsule, the focus of NASA's $264 million Genesis mission, spent three years in space collecting solar wind particles for scientific study. It entered the Earth's atmosphere as scheduled Wednesday morning on track toward an expected rendezvous with hovering helicopters, which were to snag the capsule's parachute in midair and lower the 450-pound probe gently to the ground. But the capsule hurtled out of control and struck the ground at 200 mph after both its small braking chute and larger parafoil failed to open.

Pyrotechnic devices, designed to release the parachutes, failed to fire. Scientists said Friday that the devices never received the electronic signal that would have deployed the chutes.

"Without this input from the spacecraft, our parachute recovery system was not able to deploy and function as designed," said Jerry Rowan, manager of military and aerial delivery systems for the parachute maker, Pioneer Aerospace Corp. of South Windsor, Conn., in a statement.

Scientists said Friday that two investigation boards -- one at NASA, one at the JPL in Pasadena -- have been created to determine what went wrong. Finding the answer could take months, they said.

In the meantime, Genesis scientists are preparing to gingerly open the capsule's cracked inner canister -- "like peeling back the layers of an onion," one of them said. The canister holds a set of fragile collector plates, made from high-purity materials such as sapphire and gold, which are expected to hold billions of atom- sized solar particles -- the equivalent of a few grains of salt.

While some of the collector plates shattered in the crash, scientists said Friday that others remain intact and should contain useful solar data. They have been peering at the canister's innards through a 6-inch-wide gash suffered during the crash.

Scientists said their greatest concern is that the plates have been contaminated by dirt that breached the broken canister after impact. But Wiens said that any grains of dirt would likely remain on the surface of the plates while the solar particles would be embedded just beneath, allowing scientists to salvage the precious data.

"It's amazing, for the amount of the breach of our canister, how visually clean it is inside," said Don Sevilla, Genesis payload team leader at the JPL. "We're not talking about great globs of dirt."

Scientists said the lessons of Genesis' crash may help future space missions, including NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which is designed to catch debris from comets and is due to land by parachutes in Utah's west desert in January 2006.

"Genesis has been a true pathfinder," Lee said. "Sometimes it's when you have a failure that you learn the most."

griggs@sltrib.com

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