Genesis was the NASA spacecraft that collected solar-wind samples and returned them to Earth in 2004.
NASA launched Genesis on August 8, 2001, as part of the Discovery Program. Rather than landing on another world, the probe traveled to the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange-point region, where it could sample the solar wind before Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic environment altered it. Genesis exposed collector arrays for about 850 days, gathering ions on ultra-pure materials including silicon, sapphire, gold, and diamond-like carbon.
The sample-return capsule came back on September 8, 2004. Its parachutes failed to deploy because of a design flaw involving a deceleration sensor, so the capsule crash-landed at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground. The impact damaged and contaminated many collectors, but scientists recovered enough material to accomplish major objectives.
Genesis was important because it returned the first samples collected beyond the Moon’s orbit since the Apollo era and provided direct information about the Sun’s elemental and isotopic composition. It is commonly confused with Stardust, which returned comet dust in 2006, or Hayabusa, which returned asteroid material in 2010.