Even as NASA announced the head of the Genesis Mishap Investigation Board (Dr. Michael Ryschkewitsch, Director of the Applied Engineering and Technology Directorate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), unexpectedly good news from the mission continued to mount. At least two of the four segments of the solar wind concentrator Genesis carried seem to be intact, and the gold foils used to analyze nitrogen isotopes have also survived.
Even the hexagonal wafers that collected solar wind particles may yield good data, despite the fact that all or nearly all are broken. “”We won’t really know how many can be recovered for some time, but we are far more hopeful important science can be conducted than we were on Wednesday,” said Dr. Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a member of the Genesis science team. “We are very encouraged.”
This is astoundingly good news to anyone who watched Genesis hit the ground at the Utah Test & Training Range at close to 200 mph on September 8. And what a commentary on the design of the spacecraft that anything could survive this impact. More on the mission can be found at NASA’s Genesis site.
Other sources: “Genesis Scientists Bouncing Back from Hard Landing,” (NASA press release 04-296); “NASA Appoints Genesis Mishap Investigation Board Leader,” (NASA release 04-295).
