NASA Genesis Mission Status Report 30 September 2004
The Genesis team is preparing to ship its samples of the Sun from the
mission’s temporary cleanroom at the U.S. Army Proving Ground, Dugway,
Utah, to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston.
“We have essentially completed the recovery and documentation process
and now are in the business of preparing everything for transport,”
said Eileen Stansbery, Johnson Space Center assistant director of
astromaterials research and exploration science. “We still have a way
to go before we can quantify our recovery of the solar sample. I can
tell you we have come a long way from September 8, and things are
looking very, very good.”
A major milestone in the process was the recovery of the Genesis
mission’s four separate segments of the concentrator target. Designed
to measure the isotopic ratios of oxygen and nitrogen, the segments
contain within their structure the samples that are the mission’s most
important science goal.
“Retrieving the concentrator target was our number one priority,”
Stansbery said. “When I first saw three of the four target segments
were intact, and the fourth was mostly intact, my heart leapt. Inside
those segments are three years of the solar samples, which to the
scientific community, means eons worth of history of the birth of our
solar system. I saw those, and I knew we had just overcome a major
hurdle.”
Other milestones in the recovery process included the discovery that
the gold foil collector was undamaged and in excellent condition. The
gold foil, which is expected to contain almost a million billion atoms
of solar wind, was considered the number two priority for science
recovery. The polished aluminum collector was misshapen by the impact.
However, it is intact and expected to also yield secrets about the
Sun. Another occurred when the cleanroom team disassembled the
collector arrays. They revealed, among large amounts of useable array
material, some almost whole sapphire and coated sapphire collectors
and a metallic glass collector.
Packing solar samples for transport is a little different than packing
a house-worth of belongings for a cross-country move. After the
meticulous process of inspection and documentation, each segment of
collector gets its own ID number, photograph and carrying case. The
samples and shipping containers fill the space of about two full size
refrigerators. The Genesis material will probably move to the Johnson
Space Center within the next week.
“If you had told me September 8 that we would be ready to move Genesis
samples to Houston within the month I would have replied, ‘no way,'”
said Genesis Project Manager Don Sweetnam of NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “But here we are, with an opportunity to
fulfill our major science objectives. It is a great day for Genesis,
and I expect many more to come.”
For more information about the Genesis mission on the Internet, visit
For background information about Genesis on the Internet, visit
