As you may have heard in the press conference, they had a requirement to get the sample section into the clean room w/in 2hrs of reentry. They had some kind of gas onboard to nominally retain positive pressure for that length of time. The project lead said that obviously that requirement has now been waved. It does sound like they will have to deal with contaminated samples - but they currently can't tell how bad the contamination is. They seemed to indicate that it will be somewhere between 3 to 8 hours before they will have things in the clean room.
-----Original Message----- From: Chuck Hards [mailto:chuckhards@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 12:44 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: RE: [Utah-astronomy] Bowling ball drop.
Dale, if the sample section has been breached, won't the samples become contanimated or scattered, and thus valueless? Is the clock ticking here? Is some engineer going to have to brave the unfired pyros, don a bombsquad suit, and start digging?
--- Dale Hooper <Dale.Hooper@sdl.usu.edu> wrote:
The images provided by the helicopter seemed to show that the heat shield had separated and the sample section had opened - upon impact.
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