Scientists Left to Pick Up the Pieces Over the $250m Can That Fell to Earth

Stunned British and American scientists watched a seven-year dream fall to Earth yesterday at 150mph, potentially smashing the fruits of a $250m mission.

A parachute failed to open, and a capsule filled with particles trapped directly from the sun - the first ever delivery to Earth of material from beyond the moon - dropped like a stone from the edge of space and hit the muddy sands of the Utah desert with a thud.

Inside the capsule was the most delicate and expensive material ever wrapped in a parcel.

The Genesis mission carried suntraps made of thin wafers of gold, diamond and sapphire out into space to a point a million miles from Earth. In 30 months, these wafers probably caught billions of atoms of stuff from the sun, ejected in solar explosions at speeds of a million miles an hour. In total, the payload sent back to Earth weighed no more than a fraction of a grain of salt. It was carried in a large sealed container and dropped by the returning spacecraft just before 5pm yesterday.

Below, two Hollywood stunt pilots circled in helicopters, hoping to hook the parachute that should have opened to slow the descent of the return capsule as it swayed across the sands of the desert. They would have had five chances to do so during the descent. They had practised the manoeuvre almost a dozen times, and caught the test capsule every time.

When the real thing happened, they didn't get a chance. By the time scientists had realised what was happening, the canister of sunshine was half buried in the sand.

One of those who may have to pick up the pieces is Ian Franchi, who together with his colleague Colin Pillinger of the Open University, would have been among the first investigators to get their hands on the stuff delivered by special messenger from the sun.

"I don't think this is a disaster," Dr Franchi said. "The spacecraft looks like it was in a single piece. There is a container within the spacecraft that the samples were in. It probably hit the ground on the order of 150mph. It seems like it hit something fairly soft, like a salt flat. I do know that there was a bit of rain at the end of last week so it is probably not the hardest bit of ground that it could have hit."

It was the second blow for the Open University planetary scientists. Their mission Beagle 2 failed to report when it arrived on Mars on Christmas Day.

With luck, the wafers that contain atoms forged in the thermonuclear furnace of the sun may have survived the impact. But nobody will know for days: the biggest fear is that material first trapped in the enormous emptiness of space will be contaminated by similar atoms from Earth.

"There is a possibility that they will be contaminated," Dr Franchi said. "We were always going to have to deal with some contamination. Contamination issues will probably be a lot greater now, but that just means we will have to be a bit more clever, a bit more careful when we are dealing with the samples."