Genesis mission
Genesis was a NASA mission that collected solar wind particles and returned them to Earth in 2004.
Genesis was a NASA mission launched in August 2001. It travelled to a point about 1.5 million kilometres sunward of Earth and spent more than two years exposing ultra-pure collector plates, made of silicon, sapphire, diamond-like carbon and gold, to the solar wind. Atoms from the Sun embedded themselves in the plates.
When the capsule returned on 8 September 2004, its parachutes failed to open because a sensor had been installed upside down, and it crashed into the Utah desert at about 300 kilometres per hour. Remarkably, careful cleaning allowed scientists to recover many usable fragments.
Genesis delivered key results. It showed that the Sun is richer in oxygen-16 than Earth, the Moon and most meteorites, by about 6 per cent, implying that the planets formed from material altered in their oxygen isotopes. It also showed the Sun's nitrogen differs from Earth's. Such measurements anchor our understanding of the starting composition of the Solar System.
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