| Pilots will try to snag space capsule on descend |
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In a harrowing feat high over the Utah desert Wednesday, two helicopter stunt pilots will try to snatch a floating space capsule that holds "a piece of the sun" and bring it safely down.
The stuntmen will be trying to hook the 400-pound Genesis capsule as it hurtles 400 feet a minute. Inside it are fragile solar wind particles - so small they're invisible -which scientists hope will reveal clues about the origin of our solar system.
The biggest challenge, the pilots say, will be flying at 40 mph nearly a mile above the desert without any visual reference points to judge distance or speed as they close in with hook and cable on the capsule.
The helicopter pilots will have 5 chances to snag the capsule in midair. Military pilots were unavailable for a mission that required them to commit to a task six years in the future. The civilian pilots have replicated the retrieval without fumbles in dozens of practice runs, but are terrified of failing as NASA television broadcasts a worldwide feed.
If they miss and the Genesis capsule hits the ground hard, scientists say they'd have to spend months sorting through broken jewelry-studded disks holding the tiny solar wind particles.
For NASA engineers a white-knuckle moment will be when the capsule must be steered through a "keyhole" high in the Earth's atmosphere. If the experts at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory can't line up the precise entry and angle, Genesis will be waved off on an elliptical orbit of Earth, and another attempt would be made in 6 months.
Genesis has been moving in tandem with Earth outside its magnetic shield on three orbits of the sun. Now on a trajectory back home, it is picking up speed rapidly as Earth's gravitational pull brings it closer and will hit a top speed of 24,600 mph before the atmosphere slows the descent.
The Genesis mission marks the first time NASA has collected and returned any objects from farther than the moon, said Roy Haggard, Genesis' flight operations chief and CEO of Vertigo Inc., which designed the capture system.
Together, the charged atoms captured on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire, diamond and silicone are no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that's enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of planets.
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