Photograph by NASA
The Genesis space capsule was to have deployed a parachute but instead crashed into the ground.
Photograph by NASA
Posted on 09/09/2004 4:14:44 PM PDT by neverdem
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah, Sept. 8 - NASA's $264 million Genesis mission came to a sudden and violent end on Wednesday morning, when a capsule returning with samples of the Sun slammed into the desert here at nearly 200 miles an hour after its parachutes failed to open.
Two helicopters flown by Hollywood stunt pilots had been hovering in the area to catch the capsule in midair as it glided gently over the desert at 25 m.p.h. under a large parafoil parachute. The stuntmen never had the chance.
The capsule crashed in the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range, a vast open space in western Utah. Even with the parachute failure, the capsule still fell within the expected landing area, and officials said there was never any danger to people or buildings.
The impact left the 450-pound capsule, which looked like a small flying saucer, on its side half-buried in the sand, with its inner canister cracked open to the desert air. Inside the canister some, if not all, of the plates that had been collecting particles from the Sun lay shattered.
"It would be like a coffee can that had been pulled open halfway," said Roy Haggard, chief executive of Vertigo Inc., the company that designed the system for using helicopters for midair catches of spacecraft. Mr. Haggard, who was aboard the lead helicopter that was to have caught the Genesis, serving as director of flight operations, was among the first to walk around the crash site. "It was sad," he said.
Mission scientists, however, expressed varying degrees of optimism that some of the knowledge they hoped to glean from the cargo would still be salvageable, even though the collection plates had been shattered and contaminated by air, dirt and moisture.
"As long as we find some shards, we'll get some interesting science," said Dr. Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was the lead scientist for three of the instruments. "There's no question about it."
Dr. Donald S. Burnett, a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and the mission's principal investigator, said: "We'll do the best we can. I'm not making any promises."
Sean O'Keefe, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, issued a statement saying, "We're hopeful that what appears to be a setback will eventually return some impressive results."
The Genesis is the latest high-profile failure for NASA, which is struggling to define its goals and purpose after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia last year. The successful landings of two rovers on Mars in January buoyed optimism, at least with NASA's robotic missions. Wednesday's loss, however, harkened to darker days in 1999 when two missions to Mars, Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander, were lost. Subsequent investigation showed that those two missions were hampered by inadequate financing, which led to too many shortcuts.
John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, noted that the space agency had never previously tried to bring back a craft from deep space this way. "We seem to be able to land on Mars, but not on Earth," he said.
The Genesis craft spent more than two years in deep space collecting particles of solar wind - charged atoms that are continuously blown out from the outer layers of the Sun. Those layers are believed to be largely unchanged since the birth of the solar system, and data from the Genesis could tell much about the cloud of gas and dust that turned into planets.
Launched in 2001, the craft had traveled 930,000 miles, to a point where gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun cancel out. There, it deployed five panels, each consisting of 55 hexagonal, coaster-size collection plates made of silicon, sapphire, diamond and other materials and waited as particles of solar wind embedded themselves in the plates. After 850 days, it packed up in April and headed back toward Earth.
The return had appeared to be proceeding smoothly. Early Wednesday morning, the capsule separated from rest of the spacecraft. The spacecraft continued past Earth to an orbit around the Sun, where it will float harmlessly. The capsule continued toward Earth's atmosphere.
With perfect weather conditions of bright sun, blue skies and wispy clouds, the helicopters took off at 9:25 a.m. for the midair rendezvous.
Less than half an hour later, the capsule re-entered the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 m.p.h., relying on friction with the air to slow it down. At a height of 21 miles, it should have exploded a mortar to deploy a small parachute to stabilize its tumbling. Six minutes after re-entry, at a height of four miles, the main parafoil parachute was to unfurl.
Visitors and guests, watching the retrieval on two large screens in a hangar here, cheered when the returning capsule was spotted by a high-magnification camera at 9:53 a.m.
Teresa Rudert, wife of Dan Rudert, one of the helicopter pilots, thought the initial image was the small parachute spiraling out. "I realized it was just the capsule," Ms. Rudert said, "and the people around me reacted a bit and said, 'We should see the chute about now.' "
Over the next few minutes, the image grew bigger, showing a capsule spinning and tumbling.
The crowd fell silent and confused when the controller said, "Ground impact."
In the helicopters, the crews were still waiting for confirmation of parachute deployment when they heard that news. "They had to say it a couple of times before we could take it to heart," Mr. Haggard said.
By Wednesday evening, a recovery team had extracted the canister and taken it to a sterile room.
"The fact is, yes, it's bad," said Donald R. Sevilla, the payload recovery lead engineer. "It's probably not mission catastrophic. We have our samples. The question is how much has been contaminated and how much of it can be recovered."
The explosive charges that should have deployed the parachutes remain unexploded. Mr. Sevilla said it was highly unlikely that all of the charges were defective. Rather, he said, the problem probably involved sensors that were to measure the capsule's deceleration and trigger the parachutes' deployment, the computer that should have commanded the deployment or the battery that should have set off the explosives.
The recovery team disabled the explosives before removing the canister.
The Genesis, like the two successful Mars missions this year and the two failed ones in 1999, was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Its re-entry system was designed by Lockheed-Martin, which built the spacecraft.
Chris Jones, director of solar system exploration at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said backups existed for each component in the re-entry system. But both sets experienced the same conditions in space.
"It would take two independent failures for what happened," Mr. Jones said. "There might be a common cause."
Within 72 hours, NASA will set up an investigation board to determine what went wrong.
What is also uncertain is the impact the failure will have on NASA's Stardust mission, which collected samples from the tail of a comet earlier this year. In January 2006, it too is to parachute into Dugway and be caught in midair, just as the Genesis capsule was to have been.
Photograph by NASA
The Genesis space capsule was to have deployed a parachute but instead crashed into the ground.
Photograph by NASA
ping
Caption.
Saucer shaped object lands at Grovers Mill, Utah.
That is a great job on the picture!
yes it is! but not mine, grabbed it off the ng's
The legacy of Dan Golden's "Better, faster, cheaper" program continues to pay its dues.
Scientists amazed to find calichi dust and wild burdock seed present in solar corona!
[NASA requests additional three billion dollars for further study.]
That's what happens when you name your capsule "The Kerry Campaign".
The probe was just doing an impersonation of the Kerry campaign.
Recovery sytems are still the weak link when it comes to return to Earth payloads.
I hope those Da Vinci guys get it right when they go for the X-Prize.
You'd think that for 250 or so million bucks, this thing could do the analysis on board and land itself too.
ROTFL!
Al Gore should have invented a better capsule.
It ain't the money, it's the principle of it. Splurge on the mission, and include a back-up chute.
Now, a nitpik:
"As long as we find some shards, we'll *get* some interesting *science*," said Dr. Roger Wiens"
Doctor, science is a PROCESS, not an object, abstract or concrete. Knowlege; scientific evidence; scientific data is what you may or may not glean, obtain, or discover. Get it? Now, scram!
ill say it..its bushes fault lol
"Al Gore should have invented a better capsule."
He would have but he was rushing because he was late for a vote-counting party (they are starting early this time).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.