Any species that reaches the stars is required to have their fingertips sung. Probably several times.
One of NASA’s posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site is an iconic reminder of the calamities of our space history.
“A flying saucer from outer space landed in the Utah desert after being tracked by radar and tracked by helicopters,” the photo description, released in November 2018, reads, although NASA does not allude to an alien visit here.
The beaten vessel, half buried in the desert sand, was actually the return capsule of the Genesis spacecraft. And he shouldn’t have touched in such a brutal way.
Launched on August 8, 2001, the Genesis mission was the space agency’s ambitious effort to send a spacecraft into the solar wind of our home star, collect evidence, and return it to Earth.
By gathering data on the composition of charged particles flowing from the Sun’s corona, the researchers hoped to determine the exact composition of the star and learn more about the elements around it when the planets of the solar system formed.
To bring us samples of solar wind, the Genesis boat was equipped with a sample return capsule containing a canister of solar wind materials, collected when the boat spent two years orbiting Lagrange Point 1 – one of the points in space where gravity on Earth and the Sun are precisely balanced.
The ship captured the solar wind by folding a series of collector arrays, each loaded with high-purity materials such as aluminum, sapphire, silicon and even gold.
Rendering of the spacecraft artist with his folded matrices. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)
“The materials we used in the Genesis collection matrices had to be physically strong enough to be released without breaking; keep the sample while it is heated by the Sun during collection; and be pure enough to analyze the elements of the solar wind after the Earth returns, “project scientist Amy Jurewicz explained on September 3, 2004.
Five days later, that sample capsule and its precious networks shattered in Utah, at an estimated speed of 310 km / h (193 mph).
(USAF 388th Range Sqd., Genesis Mission, NASA)
What was to happen was quite different – 127 seconds after re-entering the atmosphere, a mortar on board the capsule would throw, releasing a preliminary parachute to slow down and stabilize the descent.
Then a main parachute would swell, giving the capsule a slight descent into the Utah Test and Training Range.
In the photo of the accident, you can see helicopters – they were floating nearby, ready to catch the capsule in the air and transport it directly to a clean room to avoid contamination of the samples.
None of the deployed parachutes.
After a thorough investigation, the error was traced back to a set of sensors, only the size of the metal end of a pencil. They had been installed in the back.
These small devices were supposed to detect increasing g forces as the capsule dropped to the ground and triggered the parachute.
As you can imagine, the crash caused severe damage, breaking several networks and contaminating the precious cargo inside.
Once the sample capsule was recovered from the place where his heart died, the project team began to recover everything that could be recovered and studied.
One of the Genesis teams, Karen McNamara, is inspecting the capsule for damage. (GODMOTHER)
Fortunately, the Genesis mission was not completely destroyed, even after such a dramatic arrival of the test capsule. Some of the robust materials in the collector survived, and researchers were able to clean the surfaces without disturbing the solar material embedded inside.
Within three years, a number of papers were published on the findings of Genesis. Thanks to the bold mission, we learned unprecedented details about the composition of the Sun and the elementary differences between our star and the inner planets of the solar system.
“The sun hosts more than 99% of the material currently in our solar system, so it’s a good idea to get to know it better,” said Genesis lead researcher Don Burnett of the California Institute of Technology in 2011. .
“Although it was more challenging than we expected, we answered a few important questions and, like all successful missions, generated many more.”
A version of this story was first published in November 2018.