A space capsule returning solar particles to Earth crashed in the Utah desert on Wednesday after its parachute failed to open, but scientists were hoping that the star dust inside might have been saved.

A Hollywood stunt pilot was supposed to snag the Genesis capsule as it floated toward Earth on a parachute at the end of its three-year mission to collect solar ions.

But the capsule?s parachutes failed to open, and the spacecraft tumbled out of control and struck the ground at 193 miles per hour (310 kph) six minutes after entering Earth?s atmosphere.

The flight had gone smoothly until moments before impact, which left the 450-pound (200 kilo) capsule half buried in the sand about 31 miles (50 km) from the US Army?s Dugway Proving Ground, where the Genesis team watched a live aerial broadcast of the events.

?Certainly now we are in a situation where the scientists ... are going to have to deal with a lot more contamination than they were hoping for,? Genesis project manager Don Sweetnam said at a briefing at Dugway shortly after the crash.

Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the mission was based, said he was ?still hopeful?.

?All the data is there,? Elachi said. ?The question is: ?How contaminated is it?? It will make it much harder to analyze.? The spacecraft collected ions that had been blown by solar winds on wafers of silicon, diamond, saphire, gold and other materials in what scientists described as a ?fossil record? of the Sun.

It was the first extraterrestrial matter to be returned to Earth by a spacecraft since the US Apollo and Soviet Luna missions brought back moon rocks in the 1970s.