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Why precious materials are used to collect solar wind?

The crashed Genesis capsule was outfitted with five collector arrays, each of which was tiled with 55 hexagonal wafers constructed of gold, sapphire, diamonds, and silicon.Why construct the particle collectors from such precious materials?

Because, in addition to making jewelry sparkle, the gems and precious metals aboard Genesis have extremely low impurity levels. And that’s critical to the analysis of the solar wind, the particles of which contain infinitesimal traces of the 83 naturally occurring elements. If one of the collecting disks left Earth contaminated with even a tiny dollop of, say, magnesium, then researchers would be hard-pressed to know whether the sun was actually ejecting lots of the metallic element once the disk returned to the planet.

Why all the different materials? Each gem or metal is uniquely adept at capturing a specific element. For example, pre-mission testing revealed that aluminum layered atop sapphire was perfect for collecting noble gases such as helium and neon. Diamonds, meanwhile, are best for collecting oxygen, since they naturally contain so little of the common, life-giving element.

The most prevalent element in the wafers was silicon, which is why NASA was so concerned about preventing a crash. Silicon is invaluable because of its purity. But it’s also somewhat fragile, and a large jolt could shatter the collector arrays, leading to the contamination of the solar-wind samples that NASA spent approximately $260 million trying to gather. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what may have happened in the Utah desert today.

posted by: kyawoo at 21:01 | link | comments |
unmanned missions, space science, sun

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