WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (AFP) - The Genesis capsule carrying solar particulate matter crashed in the Utah desert Wednesday after its parachutes failed to deploy, and it was too soon to know if science could be retrieved from the damaged capsule, a NASA official said.
The capsule penetrated the Earth`s atmosphere at 1555 GMT. At an altitude of 33 km (20 miles) a stabilizing drogue parachute was supposed to have opened before the main parachute was to open at 6.1 km (3.8 miles). But neither opened, NASA confirmed.
Two helicopters, each with a crew of three were in place, 29.5 km (18.3 miles) below, with a six-meter (18-foot, six-inch) pole with a large hook on the end with which to snag the capsule when it descended to their level.
But with no parachute the capsule never slowed, and "it appears that it hit the ground at about 100 mph" (161 kmh) said Chris Jones of NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"The capsule has suffered extensive damage. It`s broken apart, sitting there on the desert floor," said Jones, JPL`s director of solar system exploration.
"We are going to have to recover that capsule. Hopefully there will be enough evidence for us to determine what went wrong. Whether or not we can recover any of the science from this remains to be seen," he explained.
The 494-kilo (1,000-pound) spacecraft used hexagonal wafers of silicon, gold, sapphire and diamond to capture 10 to 20 micrograms of the invisible bits of solar wind. The samples were the first returned to Earth from outside the moon`s orbit, and the first samples of any kind returned to Earth since the final Apollo mission to the moon in 1972.
The Genesis spacecraft was launched in August 2001 and sent to a precise point between the Earth and the sun to collect bits of solar dust that could offer clues to how the planets were formed.
The wafers were to be sent to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for study.