Nasa recovers disks from crashed solar mission

Nasa scientists have recovered some intact materials from the wreckage of the Genesis space capsule, which crashed this week in the Utah desert.

The recovery offered some hope that the mission to gather solar atoms and reveal clues to the origin of our solar system could be salvaged.

“We have some solar-wind wafers that are still intact,” said physicist Roger Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which designed one of the devices that trapped the solar bits during the £150 million, 884 day, mission.

“We want to try to get out as much of those wafers as we can,” he said.

The 350 palm-sized wafers make up the five disks that were open to the solar wind during the mission, collecting atoms from the sun.

The Genesis space capsule crashed while returning to Earth on Wednesday, slamming into the ground at nearly 200 mph after parachutes failed to open. It cracked open and left an inner canister containing the disks badly damaged.

Scientists had feared the wafers had shattered like glass in the crash, and many of them did. But they were surprised to find some wafers fully intact.