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."

Comments

Hold off on blame

[FTL]

This was an interesting mission, but not a vital one. Thre was nobody on board, there were no missions that depended on the success of this mission. NASA was right to try to keep costs down and take some small gambles on this one.

I'd much rather NASA send up three cheaper/faster/riskier missions of which one crashes and two succeed, than send up one bullet-proof mission. So don't jump all over NASA for screwing up. If they didn't screw up now and again (on this type of mission), then they were clearly playing it too safe.

Sounds odd, but "Well done NASA". Keep it up.

Re:Hold off on blame

[John Miles]

I do it a dozen times on the weekend

After spending three years in space being repetitively frozen, superheated, and irradiated?

Re:Hold off on blame

[Kiryat Malachi]

So you've never heard of vacuum welds, the fact that this craft went comparatively close to the sun and thus experienced high thermal gradients (and no, constant heat gains aren't as nasty as expansion/contraction cycles, but a constant thermal gradient is still bad), heavy solar radiation (or did you forget those massive solar flares that would have wailed all over this craft?), micrometeorites and all the other crap that goes on in space?

Space is a *nasty* environment, and is in no way shape or form benign.

Yeah right

[jayhawk88]

"The capsule broke open on impact. It was not yet clear whether the $260 million Genesis mission was ruined."

Any time the press in mentioning the price tag in their headlines, you know you're screwed.

OK, so now what? Repurcussions?

[Thalia]

Well, it failed. The entire project, >$200M may have been toasted. What are the options?

1. Find a scapegoat. Claim the entire waste was due to some employee, subcontractor, part, etc.
2. Claim success. Claim that the real mission was accomplished, that all the data was salvaged, and that nothing particularly went wrong.
3. Claim providence. Show uncertainty. Emphasis on how hard the problem was to accomplish. Use big numbers. Ask to try again.

And then you have to think of the correct response:

1. Penalize NASA. The project failed due to NASA error, and NASA must figure out how not to fail. Error causes less funding. Success good. Failure bad.
2. Reward NASA. There is now more work to be done than if the probe were caught. Time to build another one, just like the last one. There is no fear in failure.

Is there a correct answer?

Re:Failure timeline

[jafac]

Note to self:
For subsequent capsule re-entry operations, include a redundant RF-remote override for firing of pyros for chute.

Thank God this thing was unmanned.

Re:Failure timeline

[anubi]

RobertB: You are so right about these projects not at all being easy.

They are at the cutting-edge of cutting-edge technology.

I noticed one poster joking about NASA having a 0.500 batting average. You know, when you consider what kind of game NASA is playing and the complexity of the playing field, 0.500 sounds damn good to even me, and they have been doing a helluva lot better than that.

I think you must have worked in the arena in the technical area to have had the insight on just how complex the issues are. Very few can appreciate the job JPL/NASA have done until they have been intimately involved in it. Once someone comes to term with the complexity and the unforgiving realities of natural laws governing mission success or failure, one understands why engineers and scientists cannot always be the obedient underlings the Dan Goldin types would like us to be.

Even with our best work, we cannot guarantee success - all we can do is get the statistical weights of success more in our favor. Even with our utmost care and attention, there are still so many things that can possibly go wrong.

Like anything else though, even if the thing we worked on failed, we still learn a helluva lot on how to do it better next time.

To me, the greatest tragedy is when we lose one of our guys, through accident, layoff, or retirement, because that represents a total loss of all the accumulated experience of that individual. Everything else can be replaced, but the experience and knowledge gained from it is priceless.

Re:Failure timeline

[jerde]

it looked to me that, even when the capsule was just a bright dot with changing luminosity, it was spinning at much higher than 15 rpm. More like 60 - 80 rpm.

If it were spinning the way it was supposed to, you wouldn't have been able to see it: it was supposed to spin neatly around its axis, for stability. (Like a flying saucer spinning)

Instead, it lost aerodynamic stability altogether, and started tumbling randomly in all directions, which is what you saw. I think once it started tumbling, all hope was lost, since the G-forces of re-entry were jolting the insides in all different directions as it tumbled. Some of those forces might have been even higher than what it encountered on impact.

(i.e. you don't want to be spinning in different directions as you're doing a 30-G descent) :(

- Peter

Re:Failure timeline

[cpt kangarooski]

Because they aimed.

It's not as though we just deorbit stuff and pray like hell that it lands somewhere reasonable. This is why we had ships hanging around where our early capsules landed, why the Russians could get their capsules to land in Russia, and why the Shuttle, when not exploding, lands safely at any of a few predictable locations.

We certainly don't have a worldwide sky of helicopters, so they'd better well have aimed this thing towards the few (or one) copters they had to capture it.

It's not that hard.

It's only when we're not carefully controlling things -- like meteors, Skylabs and such, that they land all over the place. And even then we can make some guesses.

Re:Space.com coverage

[TehHustler]

Shit i would appear to have taken your post the wrong way. I thought it meant no trophies for the pilots because they failed to catch it, but you meant because they didnt get their moment of glory so to speak. Apologies, im a prick.

Re:OK, so now what? Repurcussions?

[georgewilliamherbert]

Should also fire all these quack jobs that think parachutes are the answer to everything. This isn't a freaking $260 million egg-drop contest. Kinda sad that these engineers would lose to most 4th graders. If it is landing in the desert, use thrusters, sheesh.

No.

Historically, parachutes are about an order of magnitude more reliable in practice than landing thruster rockets.

Parachtues just have to fire the deploy pyro and not get tangled up, and you can have more than one in case one gets tangled up.

With rockets, you have to control the orientation so you're thrusting down, you have to measure the altitude so that you slow down to land softly, the rocket motors have to start and run reliably, etc.

Please leave spacecraft design to people who actually study it. Knee-jerk uninformed reactions aren't going to help. It broke, but why it broke and the implications and possible lessons are important. Read some more.