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Genesis Capsule Crashes; Chutes Blamed
Cyclotron_Boy writes "The Genesis probe (reported here) has crashed to the ground, near a road in the Utah desert. The stunt chopper pilots were not to blame, though. The drogue chute didn't open on re-entry. NASA TV is covering it currently. The choppers have landed near the probe, but no word yet as to the condition of the space dust." Many readers have also pointed to CNN's coverage. Update: 09/08 16:39 GMT by J : MSNBC has more coverage and a sad photo of the half-buried capsule: "The capsule broke open on impact. It was not yet clear whether the $260 million Genesis mission was ruined."
KHAAAAAN!
Defective piece of hardware --made in Taiwan, supposed to fire-open the chutes: $5.95
The face of JPL scientists: priceless!
Personally, I blame the ground.
Latest reports have a 10-foot-tall fungal-like growth expanding rapidly and resisting all fire and chemical methods of containment.
Not.
But it would have been interesting.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Andromeda feeds on radiation!
Ceci n'est pas un post.
OK, so we had stun pilots training for 5 years, couldn't they dive in ala James Bond with their own parachutes, grab the capsule and use their own parachutes to slow down it's fall? I mean, if they get movie people, wouldn't it work like that in real life.
:-)
C'mon, NASA, get creative
- sigs are for wimps.
So much for containing the specimens...
They were ticked off when we laughed at Beagle 2, so they decided to get their revenge.
I'm not normally a betting man, but I'd wager the space dust is is just fine. The containment vessel designed to isolate the dust, however... lookin' a little shaky.
Sipping my first coffee of the day, I almost spit it out when I saw "Breaking News" on CNN's site, and a picture of a man staring over a flying saucer.
:)
Ok, maybe it was. I definately need more sleep
40 deg. 7 min. 40 sec
113 deg. 30 min 29 sec
A crash landing, even at the capsule's relatively slow speed of 9 mph, could ruin some of the data collected during the mission. from CNN piece
So I suppose 100 Mph is pretty bad then eh?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I lost control, and while trying to decide what to do, the ground came up and hit me.
GRIZZ
BREAKING NEWS: The Genesis Device failed. Investigators believe that the illegal substance, protomatter, was improperly used in creation of the Device, leading to an unstable core. The investigators believe this was the ultimate cause of its failure. Dr. David Marcus, head of the Genesis Project, has gone into hiding.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
Helicopter pilot's blood completely coagulates in seconds...
Take that, Bush Administration!
If it's not Consolidated Lint, it's just fuzz!
"And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name - ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
There may be something wrong here.
15:55:26: And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast?
15:59:14: Very very fast.
16:00:42: So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground!
16:01:03: That's it! That's a good name - ground!
16:01:52: I wonder if it will be friends with me?
16:02:31: ***ERROR NO SIGNAL***
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
You win again gravity!
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
Miles per Hour? Or Kilometers per hour? Maybe NASA should check those measurements again...
...the helicopter pilot would have seen the problem, matched courses with the probe, and sent his chopper into a 100 MPH dive parallelling the probe. Someone on board would have tied a rope around his waist and leaped out, freefalling, and grabbed the probe. All the time the pilot would have been shouting out the altimeter readings... 10000 feet! 9000 feet! 8000 feet!
They would have gotten the probe on board just in time for the pilot to pull out of the dive one foot above land. Then as soon as they brought the probe back to base and got it out of the copter the charge would have gone off and the chutes would blast into the air, leaving the scientist member of the team covered with soot, while everyone laughed.
Along with a fire truck full of "Head and Shoulders".
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
We were watching it live in the NASA cafeteria (GSFC) at lunch time on the tvs.. silence.. camera follows, follows, follows.. then the best collective "OH SHIT!" ive heard yelled in years. Then the cooks came out to watch and gave the best "Damn y'all dun fucked up huh?" look ive seen in years.
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
Foo: Slightly over 10 seconds later, the capsule will be exposed to about 30 G's, the greatest deceleration it will endure during Earth entry. :-)
:)
Bar: 30 G's??? I'd say that last millisecond was more like 300 G's.
Good point. Also, you'd think that Spaceflight Now would have said "atmospheric entry" instead of "Earth entry" -- though it did indeed enter the Earth, albeit unexpectedly. Maybe they knew something we didn't.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Man, I can dream can't I?
....move along....nothing to see here....
Damnit, I must have misplaced a decimal point or something. I always do that I always mess up some mundane detail.
Oh, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!!
NASA: "DAMN IT!! The studpid chute didn't open"
Nick Burns: "Yeah, it's the chute that's stupid, right. Yeah it's the chute's fault.
When I saw the subject line Apocalypse Now, I was expecting some comment about the "Smell of napalm in the morning." I was a bit surprised to read something from that other apocalypse.
You can tell how religious I am. :)
Maybe this wasn't really a failure, but God's way of telling Darl that he should drop his frivolous lawsuit?
I thought that involved a gigawatt laser and three metric tons of Jiffy Pop?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It was worth it, though - the headlines were just great.
MSNBC.com: "Oops!"
FoxNews.com: "Splat!"
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
1620 GMT -- Recovery forces begin cleanup.
--Chag
Soon Spock will come back to life, and in Utah no less. Maybe he will bring logic to SCO.
Lasers Controlled Games!
eom
Beagle cratered.
:)
Beagle2 cratered.
Spirit captured the flag!
Opportunity captured the flag!
Genesis cratered.
I think NASA is still in the lead.
Heard From The Capsule During Freefall:
"Oh no, not again"
Well, somebody's got to say it...
Welcome, to our new Alien Masters!
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Hey now, engineers always publish their specs with some padding in mind... It can actually take double that.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I wonder if this is what the martians saw when Beagle arrived?
liqbase
Diebold?
You know what?
I thought that was coverage of Clinton's operation!
I thought that was coverage of Clinton's operation!
I thought that was from Kenn Starr's report on Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky :P
From the pictures of the crash, it looks like a crashed ufo.
I bet this whole genesis mission is just an elaborate cover up!
I thought that was coverage of George Bush's presidency.
I personally worked side by side with some of the key researchers on this project, including the PI. I cannot imagine how they must feel seeing 7 years of their life go down the drain when this thing slammed into the ground. =(
A lot of people will wanna play the blame game, but in the end the scientists just really wanted their data. really sad.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
doh!
SIGUSR1
When the recovery chutes won't deploy, the only creative thing that a human can do is flap their arms really quickly.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
"It's breaking up, is that it?" he shouted. "It's got a hold full of epsilonic radiating aorist rods or something that'll fry this whole space sector for zillions of years back and it's breaking up. Is that the story? Is that what we're going down to find? Am I going to come out of that wreck with even more heads?"
"It cannot possibly be a wreck, Mr. Beeblebrox," insisted the official. "the ship is guaranteed to be perfectly safe. It cannot possibly break up."
"Then why are you so keen to go and look at it?"
"We like to look at things that are perfectly safe."
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
When I worked as a paramedic in the Houston area, we had an injury type code in our patient report computers of "spacecraft-related injury."
NOW I know why...
The crash has diminished these hopes as fears of terrestrial contamination bring doubts to the integrity of the solar samples. Some scientists remain hopeful. One such person who has asked to remain anonymous claims to have had observed the capsule and its contents at the scene of the crash noted, "Our preliminary findings are very exciting. We have observed from the solar sample that the composition of the sun is identical as the West Desert right here in Utah. "Its really amazing". He went on to continue "that dinosaurs once lived on the Sun". Courtesy http://jamitch.merseine.nu/archives/2004/09/08/gen esis-probe-crashed/
Genesis Crashes - Phil Collins Blamed.
I have some, wanna buy it ?
Yes, the crumbs are from alien bread.
Why not just leave it switched off until your actually in space, or until such a time that they are needed? Spacecraft can be controlled for all other kinds of actions, why not this one?
Dave: "This is Mission control, we are go for parachute enable process, on my mark"
ship: "beep"
Dave: "This is Mission control, enable automated parachute deployment."
ship: "I'm sorry dave, I can't do that!"
Dave: "Why not?"
ship: "Because I'm buried in SCO's backyard, you forgot to adjust your clock for daylight savings time!!!"
liqbase