In September 2004, NASA’s Genesis return sample capsule tumbled from the sky and slammed into the Utah desert in a remote part of the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, shattering the delicate solar wind collectors it carried. The upshot of that downfall: new scientific insights following over 20 years of painstaking work by researchers sorting through the spacecraft’s contaminated remains.
Genesis was loaded with delicate wafers that held precious samples of atoms and ions from puffs of solar wind that the probe accumulated while lingering at Lagrange Point 1, the spot in space where Earth’s and the sun’s gravity counteract one another. But Genesis — a Discovery-class spacecraft with a price tag of $264 million designed, built, tested and operated by Lockheed Martin — failed to deploy its parachutes due to an engineering error. The mishap was later tied to improper orientation of gravity-switch sensors that were to set off the capsule’s parachute landing system. The resulting crash landing banged up the return capsule and shattered the collection wafers, corrupting the prized shipment of solar wind particles.
Fast forward 20 years, and scientists say they have clutched victory from the jaws of defeat. The researchers who have been meticulously cleaning and studying the fragments say they have been able to the samples to make new discoveries into the nature and impacts of solar wind that they plan to share Dec. 13 at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) being held Dec. 9 to 13 in Washington, D.C.
Cleaning and gleaning
“To be honest, we are finally getting to the point where we are starting to do the really interesting science,” said Amy Jurewicz, a Genesis project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is an assistant research professor at Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies in Tempe, Arizona, and a chief Genesis team member working on the cleaning problem.
“We have been trying to figure out how to use these itty-bitty little samples that had gotten dirty. Now we’re finding some really good stuff,” Jurewicz told SpaceNews. The main message today, she said, is, “Yes, we had an accident. It didn’t go as planned. But look at what we can still do with the samples.”
NASA’s Genesis spacecraft crashed into the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in 2004. Credit: NASA
Aside from making sense of and cleaning the wreckage of the collection wafers, the process of piecing together valid scientific studies from Genesis involved comparing findings to data from other spacecraft observations, as well as data from additional instruments on Genesis — and studying the pieces with techniques and technology not yet developed when the spacecraft took off.
For one, there were a number of other instruments on Genesis, not just one big collector. Depending on how you count the busted-up solar wind collectors, there’s between 5,000 and 10,000 pieces available for study, Jurewicz said, with specialists “donating their time to the cause.”
“The scientific work invested in a variety of collector materials allowed for several methods to make the same elemental or isotopic measurement. The bonus is that after the crash, some of the materials were more easily cleaned than others,” Judith Allton, the Genesis sample curator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, told SpaceNews.
“The payload design called for collector materials to be of a thickness unique to each solar wind regime captured. Thus, when collector pieces were dislodged and mixed together by the crash, the specific solar wind regime contained within each fragment is identified by measuring the thickness of the fragment,” Allton said. “The 300 mirror-polished collectors looked so beautiful when the canister was closed in August 2000,” she said, prior to the probe’s sendoff a year later.
The team has also matched some Genesis findings against those of NASA’s sun-observing Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft, Jurewicz told SpaceNews. Launched in 1997, ACE produces space weather reports and keeps an eye on geomagnetic storms unleashed by the sun that can interrupt telecommunication services on Earth and harm astronauts in space.
Having “more than one shot” at achieving a measurement proved beneficial, said Allton.
Many people working on Genesis still feel a sense of camaraderie after all these years, Allton added, “I suppose due to our common focus on salvaging the science.” That sense of family and making a contribution may only happen on small missions like the Discovery Program missions, she added.
Results and implications
Genesis was designed to provide precise knowledge of the solar system initial isotopic and chemical compositions by returning solar matter for analysis in terrestrial laboratories.
“Unfortunately, the mission is perhaps best remembered by general audiences for the crash of the sample return capsule when the parachute failed to deploy,” said Genesis Mission Science Team member and University of California, Los Angeles, researcher Kevin McKeegan. “However, despite this setback, Genesis has accomplished all its major science goals and is continuing to achieve progress on secondary and tertiary tasks.”
McKeegan observed in his AGU abstract that when it comes to the composition of oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in chondrite meteorites and inner solar system materials, “we now know that the standard model is grossly wrong.”
“We have learned new things that have brought us to a new era of research, not just on solar wind, but space weathering and how things change due to the radiation damage,” Jurewicz said. That information is useful in figuring out how the surface of the moon and asteroids are changed by solar bombardment, she added.
Genesis samples are still available and remain useful to the research community. Given the cleaning alongside 20 years of advancements in scientific gear and techniques, “there is now a basis for people to look at the samples and move on from there,” Jurewicz said. For instance, the work on Genesis offers the most precise solar data ever captured in space to aid cosmochemistry experts modeling solar system formation.
“Genesis occupied a special place in the history of robotic space exploration as the first mission to return to Earth from beyond the moon, and the first return in a series of robotic sample-return missions,” said Roger Wiens, who runs the Wiens Planetary Spectroscopy Lab in Purdue University’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in West Lafayette, Indiana. “The mission will be remembered as coming from the ‘faster, better, cheaper’ era, and fortunately, its samples and science survived in spite of its low budget and its crash landing,” he said, adding that “every cosmochemistry class teaches” about the spacecraft’s discoveries.