IT MAY not be the disaster it first appeared. Much of the science from NASA’s Genesis space capsule, which crashed in the Utah desert last week, can probably be salvaged.
Initial inspections of the ruptured capsule at an airbase near the crash site suggest that contamination from dirt and moisture may not be as widespread or damaging as originally feared, members of the Genesis team say.
The capsule spent 27 months in space, collecting charged particles from the sun’s outermost layer of gas, which is thought to be chemically identical to a cloud or “nebula” that formed the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. The mission was designed to improve estimates of the nebula’s composition to help test theories of how the solar system evolved. “If we understand what we start with and what we end up with, we can try to understand what kind of thermal environments the planets went through,” says Benton Clark, a Genesis team member at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colorado.
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The craft had five arrays of coaster-sized hexagonal wafers, made of pure silicon, germanium, sapphire and diamond, to collect ions from the solar wind. The idea was that ions would embed themselves into the wafers and be brought back to Earth. Most of the collectors are thought to have broken but it may still be possible to retrieve the ions in the fragments.
The main objective was to measure concentrations of the three most common isotopes of oxygen. Mission scientists say they can see two of the four wafers housing these oxygen ions when they peek inside the cracked capsule with a flashlight and a mirror on a stick.
But the silicon wafers designed to collect carbon may be more difficult to salvage, says Don Burnett, the mission’s principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “The greatest source of contamination comes from carbonaceous materials. The dirt is full of it and the atmosphere is full of it,” he says.
The semiconductor industry could come to the rescue. Gabor Somorjai, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, says a common technique used to etch microelectronic circuits on computer chips, which is accurate to 1 nanometre, could easily remove the debris. Called sputtering, the method involves firing high-energy ions of an inert gas, such as argon or xenon, to remove a material’s surface.
No one yet knows exactly what caused Genesis to fail, but NASA has begun an investigation. Pyrotechnic devices used to deploy the craft’s parachutes apparently never got the command to fire. Suspicion has fallen on Genesis’s batteries and on-board computer, which may have failed to trigger the release.