NASA Recovers Genesis

zjango writes "CNN carrying this... 'The Genesis capsule which crashed in the Utah desert Wednesday has been lifted out of its impact crater and moved to a holding area, NASA reported on its Web site. Scientists were cautiously optimistic that the payload -- dozens of fragile tiles that had collected particles of the solar wind for about two years -- could still yield viable material.'"

Comments

Great news.... maybe.

[keiferb]

I had the pleasure(?) of being off on a sick day yesterday, so I was able to watch the landing live. I felt terrible when the thing hit, I can only imagine what the folks who've been involved with this thing for several years must have felt. It'd be great to see something useful come out of the whole project.

Quarantine.

[torpor]

Yes, I understand the 'contamination of the valuable samples' issue, but what about the other angle - that of quarantining Earths valuable ecosphere from whatever particles were floating out there in the Solar Winds?

Are we really absolutely sure that there's nothing on those plates, awfully petri-dish'y to me, which doesn't eat gold or platinum or carbon ferociously, has not been able to survive gravity/atmosphere so well, but which we just gave a free ride down here to a land of milk and honey?

Well, I guess not. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing the science, right, to find out whats up there?

Yeah, the Andromeda Strain puns were rampant, but now, 24 hours later, have we really thought enough about our return-to-earth of foreign space particles?

Re:Sorry to burst your bubble

[Royster]

There's no real mystery about chemical reactions and which reactions are exothermic and can provide energy for creatures to use. We know this stuff. If creatures could get energy from raw ores, they would already have evolved on the earth's surface to take advantage of that energy source. We do have some bacteria which can reduce sulfur and emit sulfur hydrides (rotten eggs smell) but those all mostly working off sulfur which is not in its lowest energy state. These occur where geothermic activity brings heat to underground rocks and raises the energy state of the sulfur present making some of that energy available for organisms to use.

Minerals found in naturally occurring ores are already at a low energy state. There isn't anywhere else for them to go. There isn't going to be some magical space beastie which can create a new, not found in nature, energy states for minerals itself to exploit to our grqave detriment.

Your fears are science fiction, not science.