EsmeraldaX
DIS Legend
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From Fox News.com :
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah The Genesis space capsule (search), which had orbited the sun for more than three years in an attempt to find clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed to Earth on Wednesday after its parachute failed to deploy.
It wasn't immediately known whether cosmic samples it was carrying back as part of a six-year, $260 million project had been destroyed. NASA officials believed the fragile disks that held the atoms would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute.
"There was a big pit in my stomach," said physicist Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory (search), which designed the atom collector plates. "This just wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces."
Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off in helicopters to hook the parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule holding a set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected from solar wind hit the desert floor without the parachute opening.
The impact drove the capsule halfway underground. NASA engineers feared the explosive for the parachute might still be alive and ready to fire, keeping helicopter crews at bay.
"That presents a safety hazard to recovery crews," said Chris Jones, solar system exploration director for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (search).
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah The Genesis space capsule (search), which had orbited the sun for more than three years in an attempt to find clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed to Earth on Wednesday after its parachute failed to deploy.
It wasn't immediately known whether cosmic samples it was carrying back as part of a six-year, $260 million project had been destroyed. NASA officials believed the fragile disks that held the atoms would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute.
"There was a big pit in my stomach," said physicist Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory (search), which designed the atom collector plates. "This just wasn't supposed to happen. We're going to have a lot of work picking up the pieces."
Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off in helicopters to hook the parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule holding a set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected from solar wind hit the desert floor without the parachute opening.
The impact drove the capsule halfway underground. NASA engineers feared the explosive for the parachute might still be alive and ready to fire, keeping helicopter crews at bay.
"That presents a safety hazard to recovery crews," said Chris Jones, solar system exploration director for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (search).
