NASA’s Genesis mission was the first to collect and return samples of the solar wind.
Genesis launched on August 8, 2001, and traveled to the Sun–Earth L1 point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. There it exposed ultra-pure collector materials to the solar wind for more than two years. The mission returned to Earth in September 2004.
A parachute failure caused the sample-return capsule to crash in Utah, but scientists recovered many collector fragments and extracted useful solar-wind data. Genesis is often confused with Stardust, which returned dust from a comet and samples of interstellar material, or OSIRIS-REx, which returned asteroid material. Genesis sampled particles flowing outward from the Sun rather than rocks from another world.