Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Pop Fly!

via MetaFilter

The movie "Armagedon" was a piece of cake compared to this:


On 08 August 2001, NASA launched Genesis. It was a spacecraft that would spend 1125 days in space, including 884 days collecting 0.4 milligrams of solar particles. At that point, it would launch a 500 lbs return vehicle that would travel 600 mph back to earth. When it enters the atmosphere, at approximately 11:55am EST on Wednesday of this week, it will be going close to twenty-five thousand mph. Oddly enough, this is the easy part of the mission.

Because then, two minutes later, NASA is going to catch it. In mid-air. With a helicopter. Really.

UPDATE:

Looks like the choppers missed the catch :-(



Bummer.



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