World News 09-09-2004 Daring Mission Ends in Disaster who: NASA what: Left to pick up the pieces after satellite crashes to Earth where: Utah, USA when: Yesterday snippet: "A £153 million mission to collect particles of the Sun ended in disaster yesterday when the probe carrying the precious samples crashed into the Utah desert," says The Telegraph. "An ambitious and theatrical retrieval exercise, involving Hollywood stunt helicopter pilots, was meant to have caught the 420lb pod as it fell to Earth after three years in space." "They were known as the Sun Catchers," says The Times. "With a typical lack of modesty, two veteran Hollywood helicopter pilots took off from the Utah desert yesterday as part of a daredevil mission to catch a Nasa space probe as it re-entered the Earth`s atmosphere at 24,700mph... But as the Nasa team watched from an aircraft hangar, the capsule`s parachute failed to open and it hurtled towards the earth, spinning and twisting." "Pilots Cliff Fleming and Dan Rudert, who worked on Batman, were set to swoop on the probe with a giant hook a mile above Earth," explains The Sun. "But explosives meant to trigger the capsule`s chutes did not work." "In the blink of an eye, one billion billion particles collected from the `solar wind"` turned into a few flecks amid the twisted wreckage of what had been a piece of high-precision engineering," says The Independent. [... more]

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