It seems there may be some useful material recovered from Genesis, after all.

Sevilla said experts are "peeling back the layers of the onion," using a flashlight and a small mirror on a stick to explore inside the fractured, garbage-can-sized capsule. A prime particle-gathering device "appears intact," he said, and another appears to be "in very good condition."

But pieces of the fragile collectors are "strewn about the canister," so scientists are being very methodical about extracting them.

"It is amazing given the amount of breach in the canister just how clean it is inside" Sevilla said. "We're not talking about great clods of dirt."

No timetable has been created for moving the science samples from a Utah facility to a NASA center for ultimate study. Sevilla said engineers are still busy collecting tools to do unexpected "sawing and snipping" that will take place over the weekend.

NASA TV last night had a short video segment showing this flashlight-and-mirror inspection of the capsule and the removal of several fragments of the sample wafers from the wreckage.

Meanwhile, Sevilla said three pyrotechnic devices that were supposed to deploy the parachute system failed to trigger as planned. They have been "safed" to allow study of the capsule.

"None had been fired," he said. "This points to a command and control problem," not to any failure of the parachutes themselves.

Depending on the degree of similarity between the two probes, this could be good news for Stardust -- if the problem was in the control system and not in the hardware, there is some chance it could be located and remotely corrected before Stardust returns in January 2006.

Posted by T.L. James on September 11, 2004 12:30 PM