Hi,

Would anyone like to suggest odds of the Genesis mission not only collecting solar wind particales but microbes (or sugar) from space as well?

Not a betting man myself but it'ed be fun if it had...

> Would anyone like to suggest odds of the Genesis mission not only collecting
> solar wind particales but microbes (or sugar) from space as well?

I wasn't sure there would be anything to study. But... <B>Genesis Team Ships First Sample</B>
Neat! Things are looking up.

thanks Contact and thanks Nigewhite I did not know this about Genesis Probe this is great news

I don't know why but something tells me that is information is rubbish.
If the samples are good why they have made such a circus with that parachute
and chopper recuperation ? I have the feeling that they are just trying too
calm down the situation and they will say in a year or so that the samples
were not good after deeper analysis. Could it be ?

> I don't know why but something tells me that is information is rubbish.
> If the samples are good why they have made such a circus with that parachute
> and chopper recuperation ? I have the feeling that they are just trying too
> calm down the situation and they will say in a year or so that the samples
> were not good after deeper analysis. Could it be ?

Why don't you give them the benefit of the doubt? It was tragic enough when they had the misfortune to watch their craft plummet to earth, so please don't add insult to injury by spouting off wild conspiracy theories. I'm sure that they will be doing their darndest to recover all the science out of the samples that they can.

In fact, I'll bet that a whole lot of new science will come out of this. Remember that the myopic Hubble Space Telescope generated new advances in the field of computer image enhancement, and the Galileo Spacecraft's semi-deployed antenna forced the scientists to advance the field of data compression and transmission.

> Would anyone like to suggest odds of the Genesis mission not only collecting
> solar wind particales but microbes (or sugar) from space as well?

That would depend if they stopped by a Tim Horton's (:that's Dunkin Donuts for all yous down there:) on the way back.

regards,
Daryl.

My God, a near disaster. I'm happy to ear almost a half of brought back samples survived the impact.

On Thursday, Sept. 30, at 3 p.m. EDT, Eileen Stansbery, a member of the Genesis clean room team, will answer questions about the status of the mission's science objectives during a listen-and-log-on news briefing. Stansbery is Assistant Director of Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston.
<A><B> _ for the full story Re: _ Genesis Probe update please go[/b][/url] _here

"It is amazing given the amount of breach in the canister just how clean it is inside" Sevilla said. "We're not talking about great clods of dirt."
Space.com
Yes. Amazing!

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Why went it wrong with the return to earth?

The answer is here.

NASA Sends First Genesis Early-Science Sample to Researchers

Jan. 27, 2005

NASA scientists have sent to academic researchers an unprecedented piece of the sun gathered by the Genesis spacecraft, enabling the start of studies to achieve the mission's initial science objectives.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston recently shipped a piece of the Genesis polished aluminum collector to researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. The shipment marked the first distribution of a Genesis scientific sample from JSC since the science canister arrived on Oct. 4, 2004. Preliminary examination of the sample by researchers has confirmed it contains solar ions, traces of the solar wind.

Read here the full story.

Shattered Genesis craft still giving up solar secrets

By Kenneth Chang
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

April 13, 2005

LEAGUE CITY, Texas – Like all the king's horses and all the king's men, NASA has been unable to put its broken Genesis spacecraft back together again.

Nevertheless, scientists reported at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference here that they had successfully extracted particles of the sun out of the spacecraft's battered and shattered collection plates.

"We have not given up on any of our original objectives," said Donald S. Burnett, a professor of geochemistry at Caltech and the mission's principal investigator.

Genesis spent more than two years in space collecting solar wind – particles expelled by the sun that are believed to preserve the chemical composition of the early solar system.

A helicopter was to catch Genesis in midair as it returned to Earth Sept. 8 and gently lower it to the ground, but the craft's parachutes failed to deploy, and the capsule crashed into the ground at nearly 200 miles per hour.

Many of the hexagonal coaster-size collector plates, made of a variety of materials including silicon and sapphire, shattered. Although many of the shards are large enough to be useful, "the problem, of course, is that instead of 301 pieces, we have 15,000," said Karen M. McNamara of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "Probably more than that."

The scientists, gathered in a conference center in a Houston suburb near the space center, admitted that they had to improve techniques for cleaning the collection plates contaminated when Genesis crashed into the Utah mud flats.

"The particles are really not just Utah dirt," McNamara said. "There is a whole lot of stuff in there," including pulverized bits of the capsule's heat shield and some of the collector plates.

Cleaning methods like brushing, washing with ultrapure water and ultrasound have been tried with varying success. Burnett said the contamination would make some of the planned measurements "challenging."

But the easiest measurement – looking at the so-called noble gases such as neon and argon that rarely interact with other atoms – has begun.

Daniel B. Reisenfeld, a professor of physics at the University of Montana and a member of the science team, said that scientists at the University of Minnesota and Washington University in St. Louis had found 1.1 trillion to 1.2 trillion atoms of neon per square centimeter, about twice what had been predicted.

"Considering all that Genesis has gone through over the last few years, this number is awfully close," Reisenfeld said. "We know that we are on the right track with the analysis of the samples. Not only do we see solar wind, but we can measure it quantitatively and accurately."

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me@rescam.org