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Planetary News: Genesis (2004)Genesis Samples Mostly SurviveBy Amir Alexander30 September 2004 Genesis team scientists working on the spacecraft’s damaged science canister said today that they are optimistic that nearly all of the mission’s scientific goals will ultimately be met. “We have been able to recover every different collector type that we flew, and every different regime that we captured,” said team member Eileen Stansbery, Assistant Director of Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science at the Johnson Space Center.” “We have all the samples,” she added. The team is now carefully documenting each and every fragment recovered from the spacecraft’s science array in preparation for transporting them from the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “If you had told me September 8 we would be ready to move the samples to Houston within the month I would have said ‘no way’” said Genesis Project Manager Don Sweetnam, referring to the date the Genesis return capsule slammed into the Utah desert. “But here we are, with an opportunity to fulfill our major science objectives.” Genesis scientists are particularly pleased with the condition of the Concentrator Target, which was responsible for the spacecraft’s primary scientific goal – capturing oxygen isotopes from the Solar wind. Three of the four segments of the Target are completely intact, and 85% of the fourth segment have been recovered. In addition, the Gold Foil, responsible for collecting nitrogen isotopes, is completely intact, and the Aluminum Collector – designed to collect noble gas isotopes – is bent but intact. The various surfaces of Genesis’s collector arrays are mostly in small fragments, but this in itself is not a major hindrance to research. According to Stansbery, the optimal segment size for analyzing the samples is 1 centimeter square, which means that if the surfaces had remained whole, scientists would have had to divide them up in any case. As it happens, many of the fragments are already about the correct size. While the news is good, serious challenges still remain for the Genesis team before sustained scientific research on the samples can begin. One problem is “curatorial” explained Stansbery – the identifying, labeling, and cataloguing of each fragment retrieved from the science canister. This is a time consuming task, which would not have been necessary had the canister remained intact. A more serious challenge is posed by Earthly contamination: in the original plan, Genesis’s sealed sample return capsule was to be rushed directly from its landing spot to the clean room where all traces of contamination could be eradicated. The capsule’s crash, however, breached the science canister, mixing its contents with dust from Utah desert. Separating the true Solar wind samples from Earthly contamination is now a primary goal of the Genesis science team. Despite the difficulties, however, Stansbery expressed confidence that all the challenges will be successfully met – given time. The advantage of a sample return mission like Genesis, she explained, is that the samples are available to the scientific community for decades to come. “Most of what we’re getting we can analyze today” she said, but some of the samples will take longer. “Just because we can’t analyze something today” she said, doesn’t mean its useless. “Wait five years” she suggested. Genesis was launched on August 8, 2001, on an ambitious mission to capture particles of the Solar wind and bring them back to Earth. The spacecraft spent three years orbiting the Sun with its three collector arrays spread open, gathering samples of the charged particles that make up the Solar wind. Scientists believe that these particles have remained unchanged for billions of years, and have much to teach us about the origins of the Solar System. A capsule containing the samples collected by Genesis was due to parachute to Earth on the morning of September 8, 2004. Helicopters with professional stunt pilots at the helm waited to snag the capsule in mid-air as it parachuted gently to Earth. For reasons as yet unknown, the parachutes did not unfurl and the capsule slammed into the ground at close to 200 miles per hour. A special NASA panel is now investigating the accident. |
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