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Concept
Genesis (spacecraft)
Summary
Genesis was a NASA sample-return probe that collected a sample of solar wind particles and returned them to Earth for analysis. It was the first NASA sample-return mission to return material since the Apollo program, and the first to return material from beyond the orbit of the Moon. Genesis was launched on August 8, 2001, and the sample return capsule crash-landed in Utah on September 8, 2004, after a design flaw prevented the deployment of its drogue parachute. The crash contaminated many of the sample collectors. Although most were damaged, some of the collectors were successfully recovered.
The Genesis science team demonstrated that some of the contamination could be removed or avoided, and that the solar wind particles could be analyzed using a variety of approaches, achieving all of the mission's major science objectives.
The mission's primary science objectives were:
To obtain precise solar isotopic abundances of ions in the solar wind, as essentially no data having a precision sufficient for solving planetary science problems are available;
To obtain greatly improved solar elemental abundances by factor of 3–10 in accuracy over what is in the literature;
To provide a reservoir of solar matter for 21st century science to be archived similarly as the lunar samples.
Note that the mission's science objectives refer to the composition of the Sun, not that of the solar wind. Scientists desire a sample of the Sun because evidence suggests that the outer layer of the Sun preserves the composition of the early solar nebula. Therefore, knowing the elemental and isotopic composition of the outer layer of the Sun is effectively the same as knowing the elemental and isotopic composition of the solar nebula. The data can be used to model how planets and other Solar System objects formed, and then extend those results to understanding stellar evolution and the formation of planetary systems elsewhere in the universe.
Official source
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