NASA Has Hope for Genesis Samples
Many of the experiments onboard NASA's wrecked Genesis space capsule are in good shape and are likely to yield useful scientific data, even though that data may not be available to scientists for months, Genesis team members said Friday.
Source: WiredThe capsule, which crashed into the Utah desert on Wednesday after failing to open its parachutes, has been sitting in a storage facility at the U.S. Army Dugway Proving Ground since it was dug out of the sand on Wednesday evening. Inspections with mirrors and flashlights have shown that at least some of the hundreds of wafer-like solar wind collectors inside the capsule are still intact, said the team members. A strip of gold foil used to collect nitrogen particles from the sun was also in "very good condition," according to Don Sevilla, the lead Genesis recovery engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the mission was managed. "We should be surprised that we have anything," said Sevilla, "Things are looking much better today than they felt on Wednesday." The scientists said they planned to open the capsule's inner science container, where the wafer-like collectors are stored, on Saturday or Monday. They cautioned, however, that there was still much more work to be done before the experiments could be analyzed.
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