[4][5] Genesis was launched on August 8, 2001, and the sample return capsule crash-landed in Utah on September 8, 2004, after a design flaw prevented the deployment of its drogue parachute.

However, the spacecraft also carried three arrays of collectors which were deployed when specific "regimes" (fast, slow, coronal mass ejections) of solar wind were encountered, as determined by the electron and ion monitors on board.

[12] These deployable collector arrays were designed to provide data to test the hypothesis that the rock-forming elements keep their relative proportions throughout the processes which form the solar wind.

The objective of the concentrator was to bring back a sample with enhanced amounts of solar wind ions to make it possible for analysts to precisely measure the isotopes of the light elements.

The sample return capsule entered Earth's atmosphere over northern Oregon at 16:55 UTC on September 8, 2004, with a velocity of approximately 11.04 km/s (24,706 mph).

[18] Due to a design flaw in a deceleration sensor, parachute deployment was never triggered, and the spacecraft's descent was slowed only by its own air resistance.

[19] The planned mid-air retrieval could not be carried out, and the capsule crashed into the desert floor of the Dugway Proving Ground in Tooele County, Utah, at about 86 m/s (310 km/h; 190 mph).

Unfired pyrotechnic devices in the parachute deployment system and toxic gases from the batteries delayed the recovery team's approach to the crash site.

After all was made safe, the damaged sample-return capsule was secured and moved to a clean room for inspection; simultaneously a crew of trained personnel scoured the site for collector fragments and sampled the local desert soil to archive as a reference by which to identify possible contaminants in the future.

Recovery efforts by Genesis team members at the Utah Test and Training Range – which included inspecting, cataloging and packaging various collectors – took four weeks.

[23] Unexpectedly, it was not terrestrial desert soil introduced in the crash that proved most difficult to deal with during the sample analysis process, but the craft's own compounds such as lubricants and craft-building materials.

[27] On April 20, 2005, scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston removed the four solar wind collectors from the concentrator and found them in excellent condition.

[28] The team announced on March 10, 2008, that analysis of a silicon carbide wafer from the Genesis concentrator showed that the Sun has a higher proportion of oxygen-16 (16O) relative to the Earth, Moon, Mars, and bulk meteorites.

[29][30] This implies that an unknown process depleted oxygen-16 by about 6% from the Sun's disk of protoplanetary material prior to the coalescence of dust grains that formed the inner planets and the asteroid belt.

[36] On January 6, 2006, Ryschkewitsch revealed that a pre-test procedure on the craft was skipped by Lockheed Martin, and he noted that the test could have easily detected the problem.