Genesis Space Capsule Crashes in Utah Desert

A space capsule returning solar particles to Earth crashed in the Utah desert on Wednesday after its parachute failed to open, but scientists were hoping that the star dust inside might have been saved.

A Hollywood stunt pilot was supposed to snag the Genesis capsule as it floated toward Earth on a parachute at the end of its three-year mission to collect solar ions.
But the capsule's parachutes failed to open, and the spacecraft tumbled out of control and struck the ground at 193 miles per hour six minutes after entering Earth's atmosphere.

The flight had gone smoothly until moments before impact, which left the 450-pound capsule half buried in the sand about 31 miles from the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground, where the Genesis team watched a live aerial broadcast of the events.

I'm told that the canister was designed to withstand an impact like this, as a last-resort precaution, so (as the article suggests) there may still be hope of salvaging something useful from the mission.

If not...It's hard to imagine this not being used as grist for the anti-space mill in some quarters, much as the failed Mars missions were a few years back (particularly considering Lockheed Martin built this probe as well -- not that that is a determinative factor, but that some will no doubt draw a connection and imply it was LM's "incompetence" at work).

It should be interesting to see what the failure investigation means for Stardust, to the extent that the hardware involved is similar -- both are Lockheed Martin built, both have similar missions, and both involve parachute reentry, so absent any ready information by which to compare the two spacecraft designs, I'm assuming that they are largely similar.

Posted by T.L. James on September 8, 2004 05:23 PM