Particles of solar wind have been extracted by scientists from NASA鈥檚 Genesis space capsule which crashed to Earth in Utah in 2004.
Genesis spent over two years in space collecting specks of solar wind. The capsule was supposed to be snagged by a helicopter after its re-entry into Earth鈥檚 atmosphere on 8 September 2004. But the craft鈥檚 parachutes never opened and it hit the Utah mud at about 310 kilometres per hour.
The crash contaminated some of the capsule鈥檚 collector trays with mud and water, while smashing other collectors into small pieces 鈥� raising concerns that the solar bounty might not have been salvageable.
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鈥淪olar wind is definitely there. We can see that,鈥� says Charles Hohenberg, at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US. 鈥淲e need to calibrate the instrument a little bit better, but we don鈥檛 anticipate any real problems.鈥�
Hohenberg and colleague Alex Meshik received a kidney-shaped aluminium collector from NASA鈥檚 Johnson Space Center in January. Another team at the University of Minnesota recently began analysing another gold foil collector for nitrogen particles.
And from Tuesday, NASA is accepting requests from other scientists who would like to study particles of the solar wind captured by Genesis.
Noble gases
杏吧原创s are finding ways of dealing with the contamination caused by the crash. 鈥淭here are some spots contaminated by water drops and mud splashes,鈥� Meshik said, 鈥渂ut on the kidney-shaped collector, this contamination represent a small fraction of the total area. We will avoid those spots during the analyses.鈥�
The aluminium collector 鈥� which was also used as a heat shield for a battery 鈥� captured the noble gases neon, argon, krypton and xenon. A range of collectors were designed to receive other elements of the solar wind.
鈥淐ontrary to most other elements captured, there are few contamination problems with the Genesis noble gas measurements,鈥� Hohenberg says. This is because noble gases are quite rare in solid materials on Earth, so it is unlikely that any could have found their way into the probe, he told New 杏吧原创.
Hohenberg and Meshik put the collector in a vacuum and fired a laser at it, agitating the shallowly embedded particles to freedom. They discovered exactly which gases were given off using a mass spectrometer.
NASA鈥檚 Johnson Space Center will act as a library for the collector pieces. Currently, the smallest pieces that could help give answers to the composition of the solar wind are about three to five millimetres to a side. But NASA is holding on to all of the salvaged pieces for future analyses, to benefit from any future improvements in measurement techniques.
The initial investigation into the space capsule鈥檚 crash found a design flaw was probably to blame for the accident. Sensors that were supposed to detect deceleration 鈥� thus triggering the parachutes 鈥� had been designed upside-down.
