Genesis Mission Design
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Genesis Mission Design 1 Martin W. Lo, Bobby G. Williams, Williard E. Bollman, Dongsuk Han, Yungsun Hahn, Julia L. Bell, Edward A. Hirst," Robert A. Corwin, Philip E. Hong/ Kathleen C. Howell, Brian Barden, and Roby Wilson 4 Abstract The Genesis spacecraft will collect solar wind samples from a halo orbit about the SunEarth Ll point for two years, returning those samples to Earth in 2003 for analysis and examination. The solar wind will imbed itself into a set of ultra-pure material collectors that will be deployed throughout the collection phase of the mission. Analysis of the samples collected by the mission will contribute to our understanding of the origins of the solar system.
Introduction The Genesis mission will be a "first of its kind" mission. It will be the first U.S. mission to execute a robotic sample return and the first mission to return to the Earth from a halo orbit. It is the fifth mission selected as part of NASA's Discovery program and brings together the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed-Martin Astronautics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Johnson Space Center. The mission goal is to collect solar wind samples for a period of approximately two years and to return those samples to Earth for analysis [1]. The samples will be returned to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) for mid-air helicopter recovery. Very little real-time science is planned for Genesis with the primary mission requirement being the sample return. The nominal launch date is January 7, 2001, with a return planned for August 19, 2003. The vehicle will be placed into the halo orbit on April 23, 2001 followed by twenty-two months of science collection.' The Ll libration point in the Sun-Earth system (between the Sun and Earth) was selected as the platform for conducting the experiments since it provides uninterrupted access to the solar wind beyond the influence of the Earth's magnetosphere. 'Presented as paper 48-4468 at the AIAA/AAS Astrodynamics Conference, Boston, MA, August 1998. 2Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109. 3Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, CO 80201. "Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. 5The Genesis spacecraft was successfully launched on August 8, 2001. The vehicle will inject into the libration point orbit on November 16, 2001; the return date is September 8, 2004.
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To collect the samples, a set of collector arrays will be deployed into the solar wind. The solar wind will imbed itself into these collectors and be stored for the return to Earth. Several different arrays will be available for collecting samples of different types of solar wind and will be deployed separately according to the type of wind that the spacecraft is experiencing. For low atomic number elements, such as oxygen, a sample concentrator will be used to collect sufficient material to exceed collector impurities.
Science Goals The science investigations of the Genesis mission are based on the fact that th
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