[meteorite-list] Scientist Examines Scraps from Crashed Space Capsule (Genesis)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Sep 28 12:47:52 2004
Message-ID: <200409281647.JAA22869_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/9778895.htm

Scientist examines scraps from crashed space capsule
By Glennda Chui
Mercury News
September 28, 2004

Kuniiko Nishiizumi brought his wrecked space experiment home to Berkeley
last week, and it's a mess.

It started as a pristine circle of platinum foil studded with about a
million pure atoms from the sun.

But when the Genesis space capsule crashed into the Utah desert Sept. 8,
the foil was torn, crushed and dusted with red dirt.

The biggest piece of foil is about the size of a turkey platter; the
smallest, the size of a fingernail. The scraps look as if they'd been
used to wrap corn cobs for a barbecue, then ripped off and thrown aside.

On Monday, Nishiizumi began the tedious job of cleaning and
straightening the crumpled shards, prospecting for bits of usable science.

``You can see this one is very dirty,'' the chemist said, pointing to
one of dozens of pieces that are zipped into plastic bags and sealed in
a plexiglass box at the University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences
Laboratory. ``We'll use the small pieces for testing.''

The first challenge, he said, will be coming up with a way to clean the
foil enough so he can find the solar particles embedded in it.

The $264 million Genesis mission was supposed to bring back the first
pure samples of particles that continually stream out from the sun.

But when the spacecraft returned to Earth and released the capsule that
held the samples, it crashed into the sandy dirt of the U.S. Army Dugway
Proving Ground at 193 mph. The impact drove it halfway into the ground.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has appointed a board
to investigate.

Most of the experimental arrays are still in a temporary clean room in
Utah, where scientists and technicians are taking them apart and getting
them ready for shipping to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But unlike the other arrays, which will be shared among many
researchers, the platinum foil from the inside of the capsule's lid were
earmarked for Nishiizumi, who is an expert in analyzing material from
throughout the solar system.

In his lab are thousands of tiny meteorites, including some from the
moon and Mars, as well as samples brought back from the moon and locked
away in a safe. He has traveled to Greenland and Antarctica to find
these far-flung bits of other worlds, and in 1995 an asteroid was named
in his honor.

Nishiizumi flew to Dugway early last week and brought his samples back.

In them, he hopes to find a particular form of the element beryllium
that is naturally radioactive, although not dangerously so. There should
be about a million atoms of the stuff in the foil from the capsule's lid.

Unfortunately, this particular form of beryllium is also abundant in the
desert; in fact, a pinch of dust contains more of it than the experiment
is expected to hold. So figuring out which particles came from the sun
and which from the desert will be like finding a needle in a haystack,
only worse.

Just straightening out the crumpled foil may be difficult, Nishiizumi
said. Already thin and delicate, it may have become more brittle during
its exposure to high temperatures in space.

Still, he said he hopes to salvage something useful.

``I have spent on this project 10, 12 years,'' he said. So if the
analysis takes two or three more, Nishiizumi said, ``that's not so long.''
Received on Tue 28 Sep 2004 12:47:42 PM PDT