Crashed probe yields Sun secrets (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News, Houston

Scientists have measured the composition of oxygen at the birth of the Solar System.

The discovery is a vital piece of data for reconstructing the evolution of our cosmic neighbourhood.

Nasa's Genesis spacecraft spent more than two years collecting oxygen from the outermost layers of the Sun.

These layers reflect the composition of the gas and dust cloud, known as the solar nebula, from which the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago. The results were presented here at the 39th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Researchers had feared their data would be lost when Genesis' sample-return capsule crashed in the Utah desert in 2004. But scientists have been working hard to recover the precious information held in the capsule's collector arrays.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7299025.stm

[Kutjara]

1. That's fantastic news. Not only for science, but also...

...for the team behind the Genesis mission. I remember when the recovery mission ended in calamity, and the people involved realized they'd just lost 10 year of hard work. They held it together during the TV interviews, but you could tell they were devastated.

I'm so glad the vital data was ultimately recoverable.