Genesis samples extracted

The damaged Genesis spacecraft has delivered its first solar wind samples.

Three years after it was launched on a two-million-mile cruise, Genesis returned to Earth on Sept. 8 — and crashed into the western Utah desert when its parachutes failed to deploy.

Since then, NASA scientists working in a clean room at Michael Army Air Field, Dugway Proving Ground, have been extracting broken bits of solar wind collector plates from the Genesis science capsule.

On Thursday, NASA announced that the first scientific sample from the probe has been sent from Dugway. It went to Nishizumi Kunihiko, a researcher at the University of California's Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley.

This success was described in a NASA press release posted on the Internet and also forwarded to the Deseret Morning News by an academic institution. The sample includes three "lid foils" that were attached to the interior lid of the sample return capsule.

"This is the first batch in what we are growing more confident will be many more scientifically valuable samples," said Don Sweetnam, Genesis project manager.

Sweetnam, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., estimated that NASA may have been able to retrieve 75 percent to 80 percent of the lid foils.

"A great deal of credit has to go to the dedicated men and women of Genesis who continue to do very precise, detailed work out there in the Utah desert," he said, according to the press release.

Besides the lid foils, scientists were optimistic about solar wind collector plates. Three members of the Genesis team arrived in Utah Monday with a special device to help in handling the science canister's stack of four collector arrays. "The stack was successfully removed as one piece," the release states.

The team started disassembling the arrays and found that several large pieces of collector plates remained, including an entire hexagon plate. Many plates are broken, but investigators have said they think they can retrieve usable information from them.

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