The Genesis mission officially opened for business today, extending its special collector arrays to catch atoms from the solar wind. The atoms it collects, believed to have been part of the solar nebula "cloud" from which our solar system developed, will help scientists gain a better understanding of the conditions in the distant past before the Earth and other planets formed.

Genesis is NASA's first sample return mission since the last Apollo mission in 1972, and the first ever to return material collected beyond the Moon.

Genesis is in orbit around L1, a point in space about 1 million miles from Earth in the direction of the Sun, where the gravities of Earth and the Sun balance. The spacecraft first opened its outer shell, then its inner science canister to reveal collector arrays. Today, the arrays fanned out like petals to catch heavier atoms of the solar wind.

"We expect to start getting particle hits right away," said Dr. Donald Burnett, Genesis principal investigator, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "Now we've gotten to the real focus of the mission: the start of science, leading to the return in 2004 and the analysis phase of the mission."

The returned particles will be preserved in a special laboratory at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, for study by scientists over the next century. It will help them answer fundamental questions about the exact composition of our star and the birth of our solar system.

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