NASA to try to salvage data (from Genesis) | Denver Post

[Ediacara]

NASA to try to salvage data

By Katy Human
Denver Post Staff Writer


Post / Glenn Asakawa
Stunned Lockheed Martin engineers watch
from their Waterton Canyon control center
as the Genesis capsule containing samples
of solar dust crashes into the Utah desert
Wednesday. Its two parachutes failed to
deploy.

NASA's $260 million Genesis mission ended in possible failure Wednesday morning when a capsule returning with samples from the sun's atmosphere crashed into the Utah desert at nearly 200 mph after its parachutes failed to open.

Spacecraft engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Lockheed Martin in Colorado now face a daunting task: salvaging information from the battered spacecraft. The future of another NASA mission - the $150 million- plus Stardust, set to return to Earth in January 2006 - may depend on their ability to understand what happened in Genesis' final moments, they said.

Both crafts were designed and built by Lockheed to explore the origin of the solar system. Wafers aboard Genesis, launched in 2001, collected tiny particles of wind blown off the surface of the sun. Stardust was sent to gather dust from a distant comet.

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[lapfog_1]

1. Anyone know what the effects of 5 years of

space flight, especially in the solar wind, has on explosive
ordinance? Kind that was supposed to deploy the first parachute?