Plethora of papers proves crashed mission a success

By picking through the debris and analyzing the less-damaged samples, researchers including Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roger Wiens have found just what they were looking for: clues to the evolution of the solar system and the Earth's atmosphere.
A flurry of papers in Space Science Reviews and Science magazine is the result, with titles such as "Constraints on Neon and Argon Isotopic Composition in Solar Wind," "Composition of Light Solar Wind Noble Gases in the Bulk Metallic Glass flown on the Genesis Mission," and more... tough going for the nonscientist. But as Wiens points out, for a mission many people wrote off after the crash landing, the science harvest has been outstanding.

"Great measurements can be made on small objects," Wiens said, and there were certainly plenty of those. The spacecraft, after 27 months floating in space with outspread collection arrays, was scheduled to return to Earth near Salt Lake City, Utah, captured in midfall by a helicopter with a retrieval arm to hook the parachute rigging. Instead, the spacecraft bored into the desert floor, speed unchecked, leaving Wiens and the rest of the science crew stunned. "Well, it brought back the samples," said Wiens, "but maybe not in exactly the condition we had planned."

In "The Genesis Solar Wind Concentrator Target: Mass Fractionation Characterised by Neon Isotopes," Space Science Reviews, DOI 10.1007/s11214-007-9179-1, the authors report on the performance of the Genesis Solar Wind Concentrator built by Los Alamos. The concentrator targets, unlike the fragile collector arrays, survived the Genesis re-entry crash almost completely intact. The profile of neon isotopes in the target was painstakingly measured and reported in this paper, showing that the concentrator worked, though the profiles differ somewhat from preflight computer models. The measurements prepare the way for the upcoming measurement of oxygen isotopes in the concentrator targets, which was the highest priority of the Genesis mission.

Image Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Laboratory built solar wind concentrator at Technical Area 3.




Image Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The solar wind concentrator can be seen in the center of the wrecked capsule in the clean room tent at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.

Another Genesis paper published in Science magazine reports a sixty times more accurate measurement of the solar argon isotopic composition than the previous measurements which date back to solar wind collected by astronauts during the Apollo missions. The very accurate solar measurement made by Genesis can be compared to argon in the Earth's atmosphere to help understand the formation of our planet and its atmosphere.

The first papers by the international science team members have been published in Space Science Reviews and another appeared last week in Science.

Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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