...didn't work, as the Genesis probe crash landed in the Utah desert.
The catastrophic descent left the Genesis capsule buried halfway underground and
exposed its collection of solar atoms to contamination. The capsule held billions of atoms collected from the solar wind during a mission that was designed to reveal clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system.Scientists were hopeful they could salvage the broken disks that held the atoms, and perhaps still unravel the mystery of the solar system. "This is actually not the worst-case scenario," said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA's solar system division, noting the capsule embedded itself in soft desert soil and avoided hitting anything harder that would have made it a "total loss."
Oh yes of course. Somehow it still does feel like it wasa botched effort and they are putting a smiley face on the ctastrophic disaster. Aiyah. The thing is, it's not as if they rehearsed the manoeuvre prior to the mission. They seem to have done it based on the notion of 'we could do it so we would be able to do it'. How did they expect it to suddenly work on the day?
- Art Neuro
3 comments:
Dr Karl Kruszczlnicki has said that the reason why the parachutes didn't open was related to turbulence. Turbulence is still not understood in scientific terms. They had rehearsed and rerehearsed their parts. They knew every part by heart. And oh what heights they hit. On with the show.
Frankly, if good execution based on good rehearsal makes for catastroophic results, I'm not really happy with the planner.
They only rehearsed it a lot as it got closer and they still had no idea how it was going to come down. I think that's bad planning AND bad execution. The end result was still a *catastrophe* as they called it, which only makes it look worse for the planners. So it still begs the question, what were they thinking when they thought up this plan?
Next time, they only will need to retrieve it from orbit. That will be cheaper etc. Commerce works in this case. Instead of allowing a commercial pilot to retrieve the goods at $10k, they cost a million a pop at the moment, and the parachute idea cost us $300 million.
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