“Certainly now we are in a situation where the scientists ... are going to have to deal with a lot more contamination than they were hoping for,” Genesis project manager Don Sweetnam said at a briefing at Dugway shortly after the crash.
The flight had gone smoothly until moments before impact, which left the 450-pound capsule half buried in the sand about 31 miles from the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, where the Genesis team watched a live aerial broadcast of the events.