DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah - The Genesis space capsule, which promised scientists potential clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed to Earth on Wednesday after its parachute failed to deploy.
It wasn't immediately known whether the cosmic samples had been destroyed. NASA (news - web sites) officials believed the fragile disks that hold the atoms would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute.
"We're going to get the pieces out," said Roger Wiens, a payload leader for Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It's going to be a lot tougher to sort out the pieces of broken material."
Hollywood stunt pilots had taken off to hook the capsule's parachute, but the refrigerator-sized capsule — holding a set of fragile disks containing billions of atoms collected from solar wind — hit the desert floor without the parachute opening.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20040908/ap_on_sc/genesis_capsule
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