Satellite

The Genesis Collector.
The NASA website offers these tidbits about the Genesis Collector :
“Since this mission is named Genesis and will tell us about the beginning of the solar system, will it try to prove or disprove the Bible?
The Genesis mission will collect samples of the solar wind, material flowing outward from the Sun, and return these samples to Earth. Scientists will be able to compare the compositions of these samples with known compositions of the planets and help in the effort to understand how our solar system and its planets formed. It is not NASA's role to address theological questions or interpretations, and Genesis' investigation will be studied as a scientific question, not a theological one.”
To do this, a device was built over 2 years ago. It was sent a million miles away from the Earth to avoid Earth's magnetic field. It was supposed to collect particles from the sun. It hovered out there for 29 months. Scientists had challenged during this time while they tried to figure out ways to get meaningful samples back from their space toy.
They decided to use five bicycle-tire-sized collector arrays, each loaded with 54 or 55 hexagonal wafers measuring about 4 inches in diameter. These wafers consist of 15 different high-purity materials including aluminum, sapphire, silicon, germanium, gold and diamond-like amorphous carbon.
All of them very expensive. Now comes the interesting part.
A spokesman for NASA stated, "The materials we used in the Genesis collector arrays had to be physically strong enough to be launched without breaking; retain the sample while being heated by the Sun during collection; and be pure enough that we could analyze the solar wind elements after Earth-return."
The problem is that when the collect came back to earth the scientists finally admitted that if were allowed to land with just a parachute – as it had been designed – it would smash on impact. So they hired some stunt helicopter pilots from Hollywood movie sets. The stunt fliers practiced and got very good at capturing the parachute on a dummy after it opened.
Then the big day came. The 260 million dollar device came plummeting through the atmosphere and the parachute did not deploy. The parachute did not open. The 260 million dollar delicate piece of equipment smashed into the earth.
Scientists are picking through the wreckage to determine what came back from space and what became a part of the instrument when it smashed into the desert sands of Utah.
"On an atomic scale, think of a collector as billiard balls in a large rack," Jurewicz said. "The process of solar-wind collection would be like dropping extra billiard balls into that rack. Now let's say that the billiard balls we use for collection are all red and solar wind atoms are green. After collection, it will be obvious if green balls were added to that rack of purely red balls. If we had started with an 'impure' mix of red and green billiard balls, then we would not know if the green balls were new and from the Sun."
The capsule was built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics which Vertigo Inc., a California research and development firm, to handle the mid-air capture. Vertigo, in turn, hired helicopter pilots and trained them to catch mock capsules dangling from parachutes in the skies over Arizona and Utah. Lockheed Martin is the world's largest weapons contractor.
Vice President Cheney's wife, Lynne, is a former Lockheed board member. Undersecretary of the Air Force Peter B. Teets is a former Lockheed President and Chief Operating Officer, one of eight members of the administration who is a former associate or major investor in Lockheed.
http://www.genesismission.org/
http://www.vertigo-inc.com/CompanyOverview2/CompanyOverview.html