Here's the real story behind the photo of NASA's "flying saucer"

Any species that seeks to reach the stars necessarily has the tips of his fingers. Probably more than once.

One of NASA's latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is an iconic reminder of the misadventures of our history of space.

"A space flying saucer crashed in the Utah desert after being tracked by a radar and chased by helicopters," says the description, although NASA does not suggest an extraterrestrial visit here.

The dish picked up, half buried in the desert sand, was in fact the return capsule of the Genesis spacecraft. And it was not supposed to touch so brutally.

Launched on August 8, 2001, the Genesis mission was the space agency's ambitious effort to send a spacecraft into the solar wind of our original star, collect samples and send them back. on earth.

By collecting data on the composition of charged particles from the solar corona, the researchers hoped to accurately determine the composition of the star and learn about the elements that were present during the formation of the planets of the solar system.

To bring us samples of solar wind, the Genesis spacecraft was equipped with a return capsule of samples containing a cartridge of solar wind materials, picked up when the ship spent two years in orbit around the point of Lagrange 1 – one of the points in the space where the gravity of the Earth and the Sun are precisely balanced.

The craft captured the solar wind by unfolding a series of sensor arrays, each loaded with high purity materials such as aluminum, sapphire, silicon and even gold.

"The materials we used in the Genesis collectors had to be strong enough to be able to be launched without breaking, to keep the sample while heating it during sampling, and to be clean enough to be able to badyze the elements of the solar wind after the back from Earth, "says Amy Jurewicz, project scientist, on September 3, 2004.

Five days later, this sample capsule and its valuable networks crashed into Utah soil at an estimated speed of 310 km / h (193 mph).

What was supposed to happen was rather different: 127 seconds after entering the atmosphere, a mortar aboard the capsule was blowing, releasing a preliminary parachute to slow down and stabilize the descent.

Then, a main parachute was to inflate, giving the capsule a gentle descent into the Utah test and training area.

On the picture of the accident, you can see helicopters – they were flying nearby, ready to catch the capsule in the air and carry it directly to a clean room to avoid sample contamination.

None of these parachutes deployed.

After a thorough investigation, the error has been attributed to a set of sensors, barely to the size of the metal end of a pencil. They had been installed upside down.

These tiny machines were supposed to detect the increase of the forces of acceleration when the capsule collapsed towards the ground and to trigger the deployment of the parachutes.

As you can imagine, the accident caused serious damage, breaking several berries and contaminating the precious cargo inside.

Once the sample capsule was retrieved from the site of its disappearance, the project team undertook to recover all that could still be recovered and studied.

Fortunately, the Genesis mission was not completely ruined, even after such a spectacular arrival of the time capsule. Some of the robust collection materials survived and the researchers managed to clean the surfaces without disturbing the integrated solar material.

In the space of three years, a series of articles have been published on the results of Genesis. Through this bold mission, we learned unprecedented details about the composition of the Sun and the elemental differences between our star and the inner planets of the solar system.

"The Sun is home to over 99% of the material currently present in our solar system, so it's a good idea to get to know it better," said Genesis Senior Investigator Don Burnett of the California Institute of Medicine. Technology in 2011.

"Although it was more difficult than expected, we answered a few important questions and, like all successful missions, we generated a lot more."

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