Genesis space capsule crashes in Utah desert

A space capsule returning solar particles to Earth crashed in the Utah desert on September 8th 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.
"Certainly now we are in a situation where the scientists ... are going to have to deal with a lot more contamination than they were hoping for," Genesis project manager Don Sweetnam said at a briefing at Dugway shortly after the crash.
Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the mission was based, said he was "still hopeful."
"All the data is there," Elachi said. "The question is: 'How contaminated is it?' It will make it much harder to analyze."
The spacecraft collected ions that had been blown by solar winds on wafers of silicon, diamond, sapphire, gold and other materials.
It was the first extraterrestrial matter to be returned to Earth by a spacecraft since the U.S. Apollo and Soviet Luna missions brought back moon rocks in the 1970s.
Scientists hoped that study of the materials would yield insights about the early formation of planets and the dawn of the solar system.
An initial check of the spacecraft showed that several pyrotechnic devices failed to fire and deploy the chutes, but the reason for the multiple failures was unclear, Andrew Dantzler, NASA solar system division director, said.