Catching a capsule

A Temecula man hopes to make history Wednesday morning by being the first person to snag "a piece of the sun." Brian Johnson, 47, will be aboard a helicopter flying at about 9,000 feet above the Utah desert as the Genesis space capsule descends back to Earth, carrying with it samples of solar wind elements it collected over 850 days.

Johnson, a graduate of Escondido High, is a payload master with Lake Elsinore-based Vertigo Inc., which designed the system to retrieve the capsule.

Johnson will have the first shot at a mid-air retrieval, using a specially designed 18 1/2-foot pole to grab a parafoil chute the capsule will jettison during its flight back to Earth.

It will be Johnson's job to use the pole and a hook to catch the 60-inch diameter, 32-inch tall, 420-pound capsule before it hits the ground. If the capsule hits the ground, scientists say they'd have to spend months sorting through broken jewelry-studded disks holding the tiny solar wind particles.

If the first pass made by the Eurocopter A-star helicopter containing Johnson and two others misses the capsule, there is a second helicopter that will have a shot. Altogether, there will be time for five tries to retrieve Genesis before it hits the ground. The pilots of both helicopters have worked as stunt pilots for a number of major motion pictures.

Johnson was unavailable to be interviewed Tuesday due to preparations for the historic event. But his wife, Irma, said from the family's Temecula home that she and their three sons are looking forward to watching the whole thing unfold live on television.

The capture of the Genesis capsule will be broadcast live on the NASA channel and also is expected to be shown on Fox News. The NASA broadcast starts at 8 a.m. local time and the estimated time of mid-air capture is just after 9 a.m. locally.

"We're ready to sit down with our bowls of cereal and watch Daddy on TV," Irma Johnson, 43, said with a laugh. The boys, Trevor, 10, Brock, 7, and Ezra, 3, "all know their Daddy has a big job to do. It's part of history," she said.

She said she believes her husband will be successful on the first try.

So does his mother, Audrey Johnson, of Escondido.

"It's exciting that he's involved in something this important," Audrey Johnson said Tuesday. "It's a little scary for me, though. I keep thinking he's gonna fall out the door (of the helicopter). That's a mom."

She said that her son doesn't talk much about his work because Vertigo handles a number of government contracts and she says he's not allowed to discuss them.

"I learned more reading Time magazine," she said.

The retrieval of the Genesis capsule was featured in an article in the Sept. 6 issue of Time and has been covered by national and international media.

The Genesis mission marks the first time NASA has collected and returned any objects from beyond the moon, said Roy Haggard, Genesis' flight operations chief and CEO of Vertigo Inc.

Together, the charged atoms captured on the capsule's disks of gold, sapphire, diamond and silicone are no bigger than a few grains of salt, but scientists say that's enough to reconstruct the chemical origin of the sun and its family of planets.

The material will keep scientists busy for five years after Genesis completes its wild ride back to Earth today. It will take at least six months before they expect to learn much from the solar wind particles.

But they expect to learn the precise composition of the sun, which "has them all excited and drooling," said Don Sweetnam, Genesis' program manager, who said the discovery could rewrite textbooks for the next generation.

Simply put, "We're going to bring a piece of the sun down to Earth," said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "That's going to give us some fundamental understanding of our origin."

But first, the Genesis capsule needs to be captured safely, and that will take some timing.

According to NASA, the capsule will enter Earth's atmosphere over northern Oregon at a velocity of nearly 25,000 miles per hour.

About two minutes into entry, at an altitude of 108,000 feet, a mortar on board will fire, releasing a nearly 7-foot "drogue" chute. The funnel-shaped chute causes a drag, slowing the capsule down. As that chute moves away, the main chute ---- a 34-foot-by-12-foot parafoil ---- will be released with full inflation in six seconds. That will allow the capsule to begin a slow, loose spiral descent over the Utah Test & Training Range.

Over the next 10 minutes, the capsule will descend at about 8 mph, finally getting to the 10,000-foot altitude where the two chase helicopters are hovering. When the first helicopter spots the capsule, pilot Cliff Fleming will intercept it, flying in behind the parafoil.

The capture pole, operated by Johnson, will be lowered as the helicopter accelerates to overtake the parafoil at a closing speed of 15 to 20 mph. The pilot will trail the capsule with only about eight feet separating the helicopter's landing skids and the top of the parafoil.

It is then that Johnson will attempt the historic mid-air grab.

Once the capsule is retrieved, either in mid-air or on the ground, it will be flown to Utah's Michael Army Airfield, ultimately making its way to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where scientists will begin to examine what they expect will be a very telling tale about the origins of our solar system.