Genesis Capsule Crashes

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by dlavery

- all we know so far is that the neither the drogue or main parachutes deployed, and it appears that the deployment mortar never fired to push the parachutes out of the spacecraft. We do not yet know why the mortar did not fire.

The rumor around building 198 is that the Li/SO2 battery may have passivated and couldn't provide enough charge to fire the pyros. I also heard that what cratered into the Utah desert isn't the Genesis payload, but the UFO that collided with the "real" Genesis payload on descent.

-Kevin

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by dlavery

- it is unknown at this time if the sample cannister has been breached. If the samples have been exposed to the atmosphere they will be highly contaminated. In that event, it is likely that all sceince wll be lost.

I thought the samples were expected to be "embedded" in the collection disks, and would thus be slightly protected from contamination by simple exposure to air (and/or dirt). They're not going to be the pristine samples of solar wind they ought to have been, of course, but there should still be plenty of useful information to be gotten.

[Kevin Watson]

Originally Posted by Marc P.

One comment on Slashdot intruiged me though- if the trigger mechanism for the parachute was a single-axis accelerometer, and something odd happened on re-entry (came in at the wrong vector or some other random variable), the accelerometer may have never felt the required force to deploy the parachute. In that case, would it have been possible to implement some kind of ground control override? Send up an RF signal to force the parachute to deploy?

The rumor that have been circulating around the JPL flight community for a few weeks has been shown to be true. The accelerometer was designed-in upside-down and couldn't detect the reentry deceleration.

-Kevin