Stephen Fels wrote:

"Jonathan Silverlight" wrote:

I'm trying to get something positive out of this loss - did they observe
the fireball as planned?

http://www.spaceweather.com/ says that the entry was observed; the sire
plans to post a video as soon as it's available.

The NASA Genesis site is at

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ge...ain/index.html

The payload container was removed from the wreckage, but evidently it's
going to be a while before anyone knows if any data can br recovered.

There's video of it tumbling through the sky and sitting in its little
crater. You can catch it several times an hour on CNN Headline News.

I taped it live on a local newscast. A long-range camera picked up
the capsule about four minutes before impact. Even then it was
obvious that it was in trouble; it was flashing rapidly. (Not exactly
the sort of tumbling satellite I watch for, but the similarity to
a tumbling Cosmos booster was impossible to ignore.)

I watched the tape frame-by-frame for the last moments of flight. The
capsule's exterior didn't seem damaged before impact. My uninformed
guess? The capsule was spinning at 50 RPMs during re-entry. I think
that something inside broke loose and knocked the capsule out of
balance; given that the capsule survived atmospheric entry, I'd guess
that the damage occured after the high G-loads and heat loads ended.

--Bill Thompson