What new science understanding will the Genesis mission provide?
Why is this important? R.W. The solar system was created four and a half billion years ago from a cloud of gas and dust. We know the dates of this from asteroids, pieces of which we have in the form of meteorites, and from moon rocks and our own Earth. We don’t know the details of how the solar system was formed. Genesis is one of the few [NASA] missions that addresses that issue, only the other ones are astrophysics missions. The most familiar one is the Hubble Telescope. It shows us other star systems in the process of formation. To be specific, the sun contains more than 99% of the solar system material. Genesis should tell us something about the average composition of our solar system so we can compare the solar system composition with individual planets. A.K. You are a physicist and many of the other scientists on this mission are chemists. How would you compare what is and is not known about the sun and solar wind in terms of physics and chemistry? R.W. A fair amount is known of
