Eclipse of the Sun

The New York Times for September 9 has the story.

NASA's $264 million Genesis mission came to a sudden and violent end on Wednesday morning, when a capsule returning with samples of the Sun slammed into the desert here at nearly 200 miles an hour after its parachutes failed to open.

This was just such a remarkable mission, it's really a shame it had come apart literally at the very end.

Genesis was launched in 2001 and went to a point about 930,000 miles out where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth are equal, so it could sort of just hang there in space. It's extended panels spent more than two years gathering up ions blown off the surface of the Sun - amassing, some called it, a tiny piece of the Sun. Last April it headed back toward Earth for a planned parachute landing.

Instead,

[t]he capsule crashed in the Air Force's Utah Test and Training Range, a vast open space in western Utah. ...

The impact left the 450-pound capsule, which looked like a small flying saucer, on its side half-buried in the sand, with its inner canister cracked open to the desert air. Inside the canister some, if not all, of the plates that had been collecting particles from the Sun lay shattered.

To a scientist or a science fan, just heartbreaking.

Mission scientists, however, expressed varying degrees of optimism that some of the knowledge they hoped to glean from the cargo would still be salvageable, even though the collection plates had been shattered and contaminated by air, dirt and moisture.

"As long as we find some shards, we'll get some interesting science," said Dr. Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was the lead scientist for three of the instruments. "There's no question about it."

However, what's probably a more realistic assessment was provided by

Dr. Donald S. Burnett, a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and the mission's principal investigator, [who] said: "We'll do the best we can. I'm not making any promises."

On the other hand, one thing I don't buy is the "latest high-profile failure" business. We have become so blase about space projects, so full of Star Wars and Star Trek, that we've forgotten how much of a true exploration this still is and just how far the technology is being pushed. We've forgotten, that is, how remarkable it is that these missions work at all. We - that is, NASA - sent a rocket a million miles into space, had it gather data for two years, then flew it back! Amazing! We've sent a space probe through the tail of a comet - and we're bringing that back, too! Amazing!

We flippin' landed a spacecraft on an asteroid 200 million miles away!

Yes, there was some fault, perhaps a preventable one, no one knows yet, that brought Genesis to its unhappy end. But instead of casting glowering eyes on NASA, we should use the occasion to remind ourselves that this is still an exploration. There will be losses.

It's so odd. When we lose human lives in pursuing a war, we want to pour more lives in after them. When we lose machines in pursuing knowledge, we want to give up. That's something else I find amazing.