Carlton Allen Quotations

It's an absolutely fantastic end to the mission.

Certainly the lesson from the Genesis crash, which was apparently caused by parts incorrectly installed, is that you've got to be meticulous in your engineering. And that's certainly going to be the case for Mars. We are going to have to design any return spacecraft from Mars so that it can handle a hard landing, such as we saw for Genesis.

My immediate reaction was that our job had just increased by two or three years, but that the samples were still there. A 200 miles-per-hour crash isn't going to dislodge solar wind atoms that are buried in the collectors. It's going to take longer and people are going to have to work harder...but the samples are still there.