A three-year effort to capture stardust from deep space and return it to Earth has ended in a spectacular disaster after the €220 million US satellite crashed in the Utah desert.
Parachutes that should have slowed its re-entry yesterday evening failed to open.
It remains unclear whether the precious cargo carried by NASA's Genesis satellite has been lost or if some can be salvaged.
Failure hardly gets more public given that the mission's ignominious end was televised live around the world, the crash coming just after 5 p.m. Irish time.
Even worse, NASA had planned a Hollywood-style recovery of the canister, hiring helicopter stunt pilots previously used in action films like Batman and Hulk to snag it in mid-air using hooks.
So convinced were its handlers that the mission would succeed that NASA had organised a web broadcast and encouraged the world to watch.
European television and print journalists assembled in Exeter for the annual British Association science festival were given ringside seats at a special presentation, and experts were provided to comment afterwards. Unfortunately the show went terribly wrong, and the experts were left struggling to explain why the mission had failed.
The goal was to send a satellite into deep space, and to trap samples of the particles continually ejected by the sun known as solar wind.
Genesis carried collectors made of pure gold, sapphire, diamond and silicon, and retrieved no more than the equivalent of a few grains of sand after 850 days sampling, material experts hope will help explain the origins of the solar system.
Everything went perfectly well up until the moment yesterday afternoon when Genesis released the canister bearing the collectors back into the atmosphere and a planned rendezvous with the waiting helicopters.
