Genesis Mission Status 10 Aug 2001

Two days after launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the
Genesis mission continues to proceed exceedingly well.
Since the spacecraft’s signal was acquired by a Deep
Space Network ground station at Goldstone, Calif., at 10:38
p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Aug. 8, the mission team has continued
to monitor the status of spacecraft subsystems. All of them
are performing normally. Ground controllers established a two-
way communication link between Genesis and Earth, enabling the
navigation team to start collecting data to assess the
spacecraft’s flight path.

Genesis’ flight path was adjusted successfully today at
about 10:21 a.m. PDT. The small thrusters burned for 53.5
seconds. This moved the spacecraft about 5.2 meters per
second (11.6 miles per hour) into a path to reach the Lagrange
1, or L1, point, where the gravities of the Sun and Earth are
balanced. Genesis will reach L1 in November 2001. The
navigation team expects to be able to determine by Monday how
to modify the spacecraft’s flight path during the next
adjustment in early September.

Among various housekeeping events just after launch, the
team commanded the spacecraft to transmit to Earth and brought
the spacecraft out of safe mode. Safe mode is a standby state
used to keep the spacecraft dormant during launch. Genesis
has now communicated with all three of NASA’s Deep Space
Network stations — in Goldstone, Calif.; Canberra, Australia;
and Madrid, Spain.

The team also commanded Genesis to spin at its normal
rate, 1.6 revolutions per minute.
Genesis will collect pieces of the Sun called solar wind
to help scientists better understand our solar system’s
development.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of
Technology, manages the Genesis mission for NASA’s Office of
Space Science, Washington, D.C. Lockheed Martin Astronautics,
Denver, Colo., designed and built the spacecraft and will
operate it jointly with JPL. Major portions of the payload
design and fabrication were carried out at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico and at NASA’s Johnson Space
Center, Houston, Texas.