IT MAY not be the disaster it first appeared. Much of the science from NASA’s Genesis space capsule, which crashed in the Utah desert last week, can probably be salvaged.
Initial inspections of the ruptured capsule at an airbase near the crash site suggest that contamination from dirt and moisture may not be as widespread or damaging as originally feared, members of the Genesis team say.
The capsule spent 27 months in space, collecting charged particles from the sun’s outermost layer of gas, which is thought to be chemically identical to a cloud or “nebula” that formed the solar system…
