PASADENA, Sept 8: A space capsule returning solar particles to Earth after a three-year mission that probed the origins of the solar system crashed in the Utah desert before it could be captured in a mid-air recovery, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Wednesday.

The silver, disc-shaped capsule containing "star dust" was jettisoned as planned by the Genesis spacecraft but its parachute failed to deploy and the capsule spun out of control and crashed on the floor of the Utah desert.

It was not immediately known if the container carrying the solar material inside the capsule survived the impact. Helicopters arrived at the scene to assess the damage and the prospects for retrieval.

"As it came within range of cameras we could tell there was no chute deployment," a NASA official told reporters watching the descent on live television at JPL headquarters in Pasadena.

Two Hollywood helicopter stunt pilots had been in the air to retrieve the capsule but their mission was aborted when the parachute failed to deploy. The container inside the capsule had solar ions, some as light as a few grains of sand. 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. -Reuters