Chopper Pilots Train to Catch Space Probe

mav[LAG] writes "Hollywood helicopter pilots have been training for a unique catch planned for September: they will hopefully snag in midair the parachute of a capsule dropped by the Genesis project before it touches down in the Utah desert. The capsule will contain collector arrays of solar particles that should, er, shed some light on the origins of the solar system."

Comments

Re:Another Article

[bbuchs]

Is it just me, or does that photo look fake? It looks like someone made a (crappy) mask of the parachute from another image, drew in a red line for the pole coming out the side of the chopper, and plopped it all together.

Re:Another Article

[Christopher Thomas]

It does look very fake. Even stranger is the fact that the thumbnail on the left shows the same picture with a red/white/blue parachute as described in the article. The large picture shows yellow/green/red.

Actually, it looks like it's missing the blue channel from the entire picture for some reason. That explains the color discrepancy, and why the helicopter is such a wonderfully eye-hurting shade of red.

little more engineering...

[torpor]

you know, engineering is not always about what you do, its about what you don't do.

remember that this particular object will have to have:

a) survived construction on earth
b) survived launch and liftoff, and subsequent separations of other stages of the vehicle,
c) gotten itself into the specific flightpaths and orbits and such that required it to complete its mission
d) stay in touch with earth
e) complete its mission
f) get back ... blah blah blah ... &etc.

and you want to add just 'a little more engineering' to it, to make it easier for it to land on the ground.

where, inevitably, the chances of the contents of the collector, a substance we know little about (yet), being dispersed to the winds of earth as a result of collision, will be much higher ...

personally, i'd have preferred they put the engineering lab doing the analysis of this material in space, where it belongs and not bothered bringing stuff into the atmosphere ...