DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah – A daring plan to have helicopters snag a space capsule as it plunged toward Earth went awry Wednesday when its parachutes failed to open and it slammed into the desert floor.
The catastrophic descent left the Genesis capsule buried halfway underground and exposed its collection of solar atoms to contamination. The capsule held billions of atoms collected from the solar wind during a mission that was designed to reveal clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system.
Scientists were hopeful they could salvage the broken disks that held the atoms, and perhaps still unravel the mystery of the solar system.
“This is actually not the worst-case scenario,” said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA’s solar system division, noting the capsule embedded itself in soft desert soil and avoided hitting anything harder that would have made it a “total loss.”
Flight engineers suspect a set of tiny explosives failed to trigger the capsule’s parachutes, and the capsule slammed into the Utah desert at 193 mph.
Helicopters flown by Hollywood stuntmen were supposed to grab Genesis almost a mile above the Utah desert and lower it gently to the ground by snatching its parachute with a hook. But before the retrieval team learned of the parachute failure, the speeding capsule had plummeted into the Utah desert.
A recovery team that includes Genesis project members was dispatched to the crash site Wednesday afternoon on a salvage mission.
Together, the charged atoms captured over 884 days on the capsule’s five disks were no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that would be enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of planets.
The spacecraft was designed and built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems.
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