On September 8, 2004, NASA's Genesis spacecraft crash-landed in the Utah desert after its parachutes failed to deploy. This marked the first time NASA attempted a sample-return mission since the Apollo program, and the first such mission to bring back material from beyond the moon. Genesis had been orbiting a special point in space known as the L1 Lagrange point, located about 1 million miles from Earth. This location, often called a "sweet spot," is where the gravitational forces of the Earth and the sun balance each other, making it ideal for studying solar wind. The Genesis spacecraft collected solar wind particles using arrays of ultrathin semiconductor materials known as "wafers." These wafers acted like sponges, capturing atoms and ions drifting through space. The mission's goal was to return these samples to Earth for analysis, but the spacecraft's parachute system failed to deploy, causing it to crash into the desert. The impact shattered the wafers into thousands of tiny pieces, forcing scientists to painstakingly recover and analyze the fragments. Despite the crash, researchers were able to salvage and study some of the solar wind samples. Genesis was launched in August 2001 as a $264 million mission to collect solar wind samples. It was NASA's first fully robotic sample-return mission since the Apollo 17 moon landing in 1972. To ensure the safe retrieval of the spacecraft, NASA used a method similar to one employed for recovering film from military satellites—using a helicopter to catch the capsule with a parachute. However, a simple design error in the parachute system led to the mission's failure. The problem stemmed from four gravity switches in the sample-return canister that were installed upside down due to an error in the design plans. These switches were meant to detect when the spacecraft began slowing down in Earth's atmosphere and trigger the parachute. Because the switches were incorrectly placed, the parachutes never deployed, and the probe crashed. Although scientists were able to extract some scientific data from the wreckage, the mission's outcome was far from ideal. The incident also prompted NASA to review its Stardust mission, which used the same type of switches but had them installed correctly, allowing it to land successfully in 2006.