Genesis Mission Status November 16, 2001

At 11:03 a.m. Pacific time, NASA’s Genesis spacecraft
entered perfectly into orbit around the balanced-gravity point
Lagrange 1, where it will collect solar wind particles.

Early this morning, engineers sent a final command to the
spacecraft to begin operating its hydrazine thrusters for
about 268 seconds. This put the spacecraft into its final
orbit to begin the particle-gathering phase of the mission.
The orbit is at a point where the gravity of Earth and the Sun
are balanced. This is called the Lagrange 1 point, or L1.

“The mission operations team did a great job, the orbit
insertion went off exactly as planned, and we’re in our 30-
month science collection orbit,” said project manager Chet
Sasaki, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
which manages the mission. “The spacecraft is in perfect
health and we’re ready to move into the next phase of its
mission.”

At the end of this month, Genesis will open its collector
arrays and begin to monitor and collect the solar wind ions
flowing from the outer layer of the Sun. The samples of solar
wind returned by Genesis will help scientists understand how
the solar system evolved.

In September 2004, Genesis will return to Earth and
release capsule containing the samples. That capsule will be
caught in mid-air by a helicopter. The precious samples will
be airlifted to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where
they will be distributed for scientific analysis and safely
curated in order to be available for the next century of
planetary science studies.

JPL manages the Genesis mission for NASA’s Office of
Space Science, Washington, D.C. Lockheed Martin Astronautics,
Denver, Colo., and Los Alamos National Laboratory, N. M.,
operate the mission jointly with JPL. JPL is a division of
the California Institute of Technology, the home institute of
the principal investigator, Dr. Donald Burnett.

More information on the Genesis mission can be found at
http://genesismission.jpl.nasa.gov .