Or, What I'm Doing With The Spacecraft Since I Dug It Out Of
The Ground
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 (CA). "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."