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Picking up the pieces after Genesis
6 months after crash, researchers still sorting through fragments
 | The Genesis spacecraft capsule lies crumpled on the Utah desert ground after a crash landing last September. |
NASA/JPL / Reuters file |
LEAGUE CITY, Texas - It was a dreadful finale to a space mission that had gone so well.
Tumbling through the sky, and without deployment of its parachute system, the NASA Genesis capsule plowed into the Utah Test and Training Range at high speed last September. Onboard were prized particles of captured solar wind, entrapped within sets of fragile collectors.
When the $264 million Genesis mission and its Sun-soaked cargo plummeted to the ground, the result was, as one scientist reported at the time, a "mangled mess" of a spacecraft.
Later inspection of the breached specimen canister buoyed the hopes of project officials that valuable science could be salvaged from the shattered leftovers of sample trays.
Some six months later, how the Genesis team is picking through the pieces and moving onward was detailed at the 36th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), held here March 14-18 and co-sponsored by the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
High-speed splat
Among the on-site witnesses to the Genesis high-speed splat into Utah desert was Carlton Allen, the Astromaterials Curator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
"My immediate reaction was that our job had just increased by two or three years, but that the samples were still there," Allen said. "A 200 miles-per-hour crash isn’t going to dislodge solar wind atoms that are buried in the collectors. It’s going to take longer and people are going to have to work harder ... but the samples are still there," he told SPACE.com.
Getting to the solar wind samples, however, has not been easy as some of the collector fragments were contaminated by Utah dirt and lakebed salt crystals.
Pulverized carbon-carbon heatshield material from Genesis was tossed into the mix too. Heat eking into the reentered canister didn’t help the situation either. Also, silicon wafers onboard the craft turned into powder on impact, with the material was found sprinkled atop all the other samples.
Then there’s a still unexplained "brown stain" found within the science canister. The Genesis science team has made an effort to characterize the thickness and composition of the mystery tarnish.
An early worry was that the stain’s apparent thickness might prevent detection and measurement of the solar wind in Genesis collectors. The brown discoloration — pervasive but not uniform — isn’t thick enough to have prevented the solar wind from implanting, reported NASA’s Karen McNamara, working on the deconstruction of Genesis at the Johnson Space Center.
"We have to look at the idea that something happened in space ... outgassing or condensation of some type of material from the spacecraft," McNamara explained.
Soaking up the sun
When Genesis roared away from Earth in 2001, it carried 271 whole and 30 half hexagonally-shaped collectors mounted on 5 arrays. Those arrays were made of various materials, such as silicon, sapphire, gold and diamond-like carbon. The space probe flew to a point just under one million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. It then set out collectors for 850 days to "soak up the Sun" – snagging particles carried into space by a constantly streaming solar wind, then hauling the goods back to Earth.
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But smashing to Earth as they did, those Genesis collectors were crushed.
Making the task even more onerous, very few collectors stayed affixed to their assigned array locations on impact. More than a month was spent in Utah bagging, tagging and classifying recovered shards as to size, identify, and found location.
Luckily, the Sun-exposed arrays within the Genesis payload varied in thickness. That makes it feasible to trace back a fragment to its array of origin.
All manner of fragment cleaning techniques are being weighed. That includes use of flowing inert gas, hydrogen plasma and ultra-pure water to utilizing cryogenic "snow" and defocused laser energy to remove contaminants.
Great care is being taken not to cause scratching and removal of the solar wind implant.
10,000 pieces plus
"We have 10,000 pieces that we’ve documented and an untold number of other pieces we haven’t gotten to yet," said Judith Allton, Genesis Solar Wind Sample Curator at the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office at the NASA Johnson Space Center.
Although this type accident was part of contingency planning, and recovery teams trained for such an event, Allton admitted to a moment of sadness.
After the Genesis canister was recovered at the Utah Test and Training Range, and as team members were getting ready to push it into a specially-installed cleanroom, "just looking at how bent up and mangled it was ... that was sad," Allton recalled.
"We had worked so hard. And it was so beautiful when it left," Allton told SPACE.com. "I can remember when we closed it for the final time. People were thinking about how it would look when we opened it again. We cleaned it in minute detail. To see how it got mashed up…kinda sad," she said.
Allton said the Genesis team was well prepared given what happened. Today, she and her colleagues are busy sifting through the bits and pieces, dealing with the contamination, a well as shipping out samples to research groups.
It’s not discouraging. It was always meant to be long-term. That’s the way it works," Allton concluded.
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