Space Capsule Crashes in Utah
By KENNETH CHANG and MARIA NEWMAN

Published: September 8, 2004


UGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah, Sept. 8 — A NASA capsule bearing precious atomic specimens that Hollywood stunt pilots were prepared to catch as it came into earth's atmosphere crashed into the desert this morning after a parachute that was to slow its fall failed to deploy.


The capsule had been carrying bits of solar matter painstakingly collected over two years that could provide scientists with clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Television footage this morning showed the capsule, an inflated disc slightly smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, hurtling through the air like a runaway hubcap, then crashing into the desert.

In a few moments, as the probe lay half-emerged in the hot sand, its round casing cracked open, investigators approached gingerly, circling the probe before they began taking photographs.

"Clearly something has gone wrong here," Chris Jones, director of solar system exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which managed the mission, said in a NASA TV broadcast of the landing.

At a news conference a few hours later, NASA scientists said the canister containing the space matter had received some damage when the capsule, which fell at a rate of 93 miles an hour, hit the ground. Roy Haggard, the director of flight operations, said it was "quite surprising how little damage there was."

Mr. Jones, one of those at the news conference, said that NASA would be conducting a series of reviews to determine what if anything will survive of the science that the Genesis probe spent years collecting. He said contingency plans had taken into account the possibility of a crash at reentry.

"It turns out, that because this being one of the most possible, but of course remote, outcomes, it does have procedures to recover the science so we can learn from this mission and feed that information back into future scientists," Mr. Jones said.

The plans for a derring-do capture had enlisted the help of two Hollywood stunt pilots who had practiced their mission for five years after military pilots declined to attempt the rescue. The pilots of the two helicopters were prepared to use a giant hook to latch onto the probe's parachute as it slowly descended to earth.

The probe's cargo is the first extraterrestrial material that NASA has brought back to Earth since Apollo 17 astronauts collected rocks from the Moon in 1972. Scientists hope the material will tell them about the solar system's primordial building materials of gas and dust that later turned into planets.

Mission managers had worried that even the impact of the capsule slowed by the parachute would have damaged the payload. Without the parachute, damage may have come to the capsule's plates, made of silicon, sapphire, diamond and other materials that had collected particles of solar wind in deep space. If the impact broke open the canister holding the plates, they would also be contaminated with Earth air.

"Whether we can recover any of the science from this remains to be seen," Mr. Jones said.

By Tuesday morning, Genesis had traveled to a spot within the orbit of the Moon. The 450-pound capsule containing the solar wind samples detached as scheduled from the rest of the spacecraft, which remained in space.

The return trajectory then appeared to be going smoothly. The helicopters took off at 9:25 a.m. en route to the midair rendezvous. Visitors and guests at the Army's Dugway Proving Ground here, watching the retrieval on large screens in a hanger, cheered when the images of the returning capsule appeared at 9:53 a.m. Over the next few minutes, the image grew bigger, showing a capsule spinning and tumbling.

The crowd fell silent and confused when the mission controller said, "ground impact."

If the rescue had happened as planned, when the capsule entered the Earth's atmosphere, traveling at 25,000 miles an hour, an initial parachute would have deployed at a height of 21 miles. It was not clear yet if that took place. A few minutes later, at an altitude of four miles, the main parachute, a winglike parafoil, would have deployed, and the capsule would have glided over the Utah desert.

Cliff Fleming, the pilot of the lead helicopter, was to make the first attempt to snag the parafoil with a 20-foot hook in the back of the helicopter. Mr. Fleming said that except for one deliberate miss as a test for the other pilot, Dan Rudert, he successfully caught the parachute in every practice run.

"We did not ever miss one," Mr. Fleming said on Tuesday. "I feel quite confident."

If the parachutes had functioned properly, the pilots would have had enough time to make four attempts to capture the capsule before it hit the ground.

Dr. Donald S. Burnett, the mission's principal investigator, said on Tuesday, "By recovering that composition with Genesis, we will be able to compare the starting composition of all planetary materials with what they are today."

Launched in 2001, the probe traveled 930,000 miles to a point where gravitational forces of the Earth and the Sun cancel out. There, it deployed 55 hexagonal plates made of a variety of materials, including silicon, sapphire and diamond and waited as bits of solar wind — charged atoms, traveling about a million miles per hour, that the Sun continually spews out — embedded themselves in the plates.

After 850 days of collecting, Genesis packed up in April and headed back toward Earth. The mission cost $260 million.