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Planetary News: Genesis (2004)

Genesis Returns To Earth: Scientists Hope Tiny Sample Will Provide Answers To Big Questions

It will be 9:54 in the morning, Mountain Daylight Time, on Wednesday, September 8, when the Genesis sample return capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere somewhere above northern Oregon. Traveling at 11 kilometers (7 miles) per second, the capsule will gradually slow down over the next four minutes as it crosses over Idaho and Nevada, then deploy a drogue parachute as it closes in on its landing site in the Utah desert. Finally, discarding the parachute, it will settle down to a leisurely descent hanging from a giant parafoil.

That is when Genesis’ air recovery team will swing into action: two helicopters, flown by professional stunt pilots Cliff Fleming and Dan Rudert, will swoop down in succession and attempt to snag the parafoil at an altitude of around 8000 feet.

"From the time the drogue deploys it will take about 18 minutes for the capsule to reach a height where we can get to it," said Fleming, of South Coast Helicopters, Santa Ana, California. "When we are up there that may feel like a long 18 minutes but we have been training for this moment since 1999, so in the grand scheme of things another quarter-hour or so shouldn't matter much."

If Felming's helicopter misses its target, Rudert’s helicopter will be right behind to recover the190 kilogram (420 pounds) capsule. If they run into problems, they can repeat the maneuver three more times before the capsule is too close to the ground for a pick-up attempt. But they are unlikely to miss: not once in dozens of practice runs did the helicopters fail to hook the capsule on the first attempt.

With the capture accomplished, Fleming or Rudert will gently set their delicate but massive payload gently on the ground. They will then disconnect the parafoil and reattach the capsule to the helicopter for a more leisurely trip to Michael Air Force Base. Within days, the Solar Wind samples captured by Genesis will be at the Johnson Space Center, ready for distribution to research laboratories around the world.

Genesis was launched over three years ago, on August 8, 2001, to collect samples of the Solar Wind – the stream of charged particles that flows out from the Sun. Three months later it arrived at the Lagrange 1 (or “L1”) point, where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Sun balance each other out. There it remained for 27 months, orbiting the Sun along with the Earth and gathering the Solar Wind particles that collided with its collector arrays. In April of this year Genesis stored its samples and turned for home. Waiting to receive it on its arrival are two helicopter pilots, the entire Genesis team, and many, many eager scientists.

One of these scientists is Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who has been with the project from its very beginning in the early 1990s. After studying the feasibility of the mission with Genesis Principal Investigator Don Burnett, Wiens was charged with developing and building three of the spacecraft’s instruments: an ion spectrometer and an electron spectrometer, used to determine the type of solar wind gathered at each point, and a Solar Wind concentrator, used to focus the captured particles on a small target. In a matter of days he will have the chance to handle the actual samples brought back by the spacecraft he helped design.

“The reason we are flying Genesis is to understand how the Solar System was formed” explained Wiens. “One of the best way we have of understanding what was going on during the formation of the Solar System,” he added, “is looking at primitive bodies left over from that period.”

Some of this primeval matter resides in asteroids and comets, out in the far reaches of the Solar System. When in 2006 Stardust will return samples from its encounter with comet Wild-2, they will include just this kind of ancient substances. There is, however, a much larger depository of matter unchanged since the dawn of the Solar System, explained Wiens. And that is the Sun itself.

“The sun,” said Wiens, “has 99.9% of the material in the Solar System.” “When you have that much, it can’t really have changed much. By measuring this lion’s share of all the material in the Solar System, we can be pretty sure that it is representative of its starting material or the building blocks.” What is true of the Sun in general is especially the case for its surface layers, where the Solar Wind originates. “The theorists tell us that the outer layers of the Sun are quite isolated from what is happening inside” explained Wiens. This means that the Solar Wind is essentially composed of matter unchanged since the time our Solar System was a giant swirling cloud of gas and dust known as the Solar nebula.

One of the highest priorities of the Genesis mission is to measure the relative prevalence of the different isotopes of oxygen, and in particular Oxygen 16 and Oxygen 18 (isotopes of a given elements differ in the number of neutrons contained in their nucleus). Scientists have known for some time that the relative prevalence of the isotopes varies in different planetary bodies, but do not understand why that is the case. Answering this question would have profound implications for theories on the formation of the Solar System.

Currently there are three competing theories that attempt to explain the surprising variations in the ratio of oxygen isotopes, each making different suppositions about conditions in the Solar nebula. Each of the theories, furthermore, predicts a different isotope ratio in the Sun itself. That, said Wiens, is precisely what Genesis will capture. “By looking at the isotope ratios in the Sun we will be able to pin down which of these theories is correct and what its implications are for what was going on in the early Solar System,” he added.