Scientists May Be Able To Retrieve Vital Particles From Genesis

Genesis might just be saved.

That's the word from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena (CA). The $246 million mission ended with a thud last week when its parachute failed to deploy. The refrigerator-sized saucer, designed to capture untainted solar particles as they streamed from the sun, ended up in a smoking crater in the Utah desert.

The solar particles were collected on the faces of thin, exotic wafers inside the capsule. Some of those wafers shattered on impact. Others were ejected. But the Christian Science Monitor reports scientists, using a flashlight and a mirror taped to the end of a stick have found that many actually survived the 193 mph impact.

"The science team is really excited," Roger Wiens, one of the project's lead scientists, told the Monitor. "We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our primary science goals."

That big sigh of relief you just heard came from NASA headquarters.

Backers of the Genesis project didn't think it possible -- but they decided to try a salvage operation anyway.

"I was concerned about prolonged exposure of these in the soil," said principle investigator Donald Burnett. "So I got the job of picking them out. It's rather therapeutic."

The trick, however, will be to decontaminate the wafers and their fragments, to sort out contamination from Earth's atmosphere and isolate the solar particles scientists believe hold the key to understanding more about our origins.

"We may appeal to people in the semiconductor industry who have talents and procedures" for such decontamination efforts, Burnett told the Monitor.

FMI: www.genesismission.org