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Isle program
prepped effort
to snag capsule
The attempt to snare data
in mid-air today benefits from
lessons learned in Hawaii
Techniques developed on Hawaii-based missions to retrieve spy satellite film during the Cold War will be used over the Utah desert today when helicopter crews attempt to catch a research capsule from the Genesis space satellite.
Stunt helicopter crews were scheduled to intercept the Genesis capsule soon after it entered the atmosphere at 6:55 a.m. Hawaii time. The capsule, its fall slowed by a parafoil, contains electrically charged atoms captured from the solar wind as the satellite orbited the sun in tandem with Earth.
Specially designed sky hooks will snag cables trailing the parachute, said retired Air Force Master Sgt. Al Blankenship of Pearl City. The satellite retrieval is advanced, but the recovery mechanics is the same as the work done here 40 years ago by the 6594th Test Group at Hickam Air Force Base, he said yesterday.
Hawaii crews retrieved more than 100 spy film capsules during the program that began in 1958 and became obsolete in 1986 when video transmission brought satellite imagery into a new age, said Blankenship.
"We started out catching film capsules that weighed about 200 pounds," said the former electronics technician. "In the last years, they were 1,100-pound canisters, three-by-four-feet in size."
The mid-air catches were made from modified C-119 "flying boxcars" and later, from C-130 cargo airplanes flying 150 mph, said Blankenship. Later, helicopters were used to recover capsules from the ocean.
All of film canisters from the Project Corona spy satellite project were ejected over the Pacific in a program under the direction of the National Reconnaissance Office. "We couldn't talk about it" until it was declassified from secret status in 1999, he said.
The Genesis mission marks the first time NASA has collected and returned any objects from farther than the moon, said Roy Haggard, Genesis' flight operations chief and CEO of Vertigo Inc., which designed the current capture system.
The charged atoms -- a "billion billion" of them -- should reveal clues about the origin and evolution of our solar system, said Don Burnett, Genesis principal investigator and a nuclear geochemist at California Institute of Technology.
Together, the charged atoms captured on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire, diamond and silicone are no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that's enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of planets.
The excitement of mid-air retrieval is the same now as it was then, said Blankenship, who was involved in 13 recoveries during his 17 years at Hickam. "Pilots don't like to fly at things coming at them, they're trained to avoid things in the air."
The retired sergeant has made it his mission to share the history. He was invited to brief officers at Pacific Air Forces headquarters last month and he routinely speaks to school classes and other groups. He brings hooks, load lines, parachutes and photographs to make the spy story of a generation ago real.
The first film capsule to be recovered -- on Sept. 18, 1960 -- is now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and the C-119 aircraft that made that catch is in the U.S. Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio.
By the time a capsule was sent back to Earth, it was a compilation of three months of overflights -- a far cry from the instant imagery of today, said the veteran.
Once it is safely brought down, the Genesis sample container will be packed up and driven with a convoy of armed guards to Houston's Space Center in a truck outfitted with air suspension for a gentle ride. From there, solar particles will be parceled out for analysis to the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Chicago's Argonne National Lab.
Scientists will keep busy for five years after Genesis completes its wild ride back to Earth. It will take at least six months before they expect to learn much from the solar wind particles.
www.genesismission.org
