At 11:03 a.m. Pacific time, NASA's Genesis spacecraft entered perfectly into orbit around the balanced-gravity point Lagrange 1, where it will spend more than 2 years collecting solar wind particles for return to Earth.

"The mission operations team did a great job, the orbit insertion went off exactly as planned, and we're in our 30-month science collection orbit," said project manager Chet Sasaki. "The spacecraft is in perfect health and we're ready to move into the next phase of its mission."

At the end of this month, Genesis will open its collector arrays and begin to monitor and collect the solar wind ions flowing from the outer layer of the Sun. The samples of solar wind returned by Genesis will help scientists understand how the solar system evolved.

In September 2004, Genesis will return to Earth, and the capsule containing the samples will be caught in mid-air by a helicopter. The precious samples will be airlifted to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they will be safely curated and made available for scientific analysis for many years to come.

Where is Genesis Now?

Follow where Genesis is now at this site which shows different views of the relative positions of the Genesis spacecraft to the Earth, Moon and L1, the point where Geneis will be collecting solar wind samples. Most of the views are updated every 10 minutes.

GENESIS PLANNED TRAJECTORY

L1 is about 900,000 miles (1.5 million km) away from the Earth in the direction of the Sun, or slightly less than one percent of the way to the Sun (four times the distance from Earth to the Moon). The solar wind reaches L1 about an hour before it reaches Earth, making it a good place to observe changes in solar activity before the change reaches the Earth. Genesis will make five large "halo" orbits around the L1 point before returning to Earth in 2004.

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