Murphy's Law Rears its Head
Poor NASA.

In an attempt to learn more about the makeup of our solar system, NASA blasted a solar collector spacecraft named Genesis towards the sun in 2001, with the plan of having it return to Earth and parachute down through the atmosphere, with a couple of helicopters with really long hooks hanging out in the Utah desert to catch it.

Really, it's a cool idea, and they actually had some stunt pilots from the motion picture industry trained and ready to go. I mean, they were on top of things.

The catching-of-the-doodad part of the project wasn't even superserious, because the spacecraft was...well, it was gonna be on a parachute, so even if they missed the first couple of attempts, a soft impact into the Utah scrub wouldn't destroy the scientific information inside.

So, today, the Genesis probe was designed to approach earth at a relative speed of about 25,000 miles per hour, skid along the atmosphere, deploy the parachute, and be to a baseball as Earth and Sol are to son and father.

Problem is, the parachute never opened.

I'd really like to congratulate NASA on botching what, really, was the easiest part of the whole project - teaching a computer to pull a ripcord.

The data inside, the solar collection materials (sheets of diamond, silicon, platinum, and sapphire, all with stardust adhered to them and locked up), and the craft itself, are all presumed to be a total loss.

Here's a quick question: knowing that things have gone wrong in the past with NASA missions (remember the polar explorer to Mars that crashed because somebody at Boeing used feet and inches while everyone else was using meters?), why did they ot build in a second, backup parachute system? I mean, the capsule weighed 500 pounds as it was. Would the addition of 20 extra pounds really have made the whole mission untenable?

Here's a picture, by the way, of the crumpled spacecraft:



And here's another one:




According to NASA's own website, "Presumably, the charges that were to deploy the chutes did not detonate. It is still too early to know the condition of the science samples, solar particles that were captured by Genesis and stored in the capsule." (article here and Genesis website here)

I'm beginning to understand why some people don't believe we even went to the moon.