DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah – The Genesis space capsule, which had orbited the sun for three years gathering potential clues to the origin of the solar system, crashed to Earth and cracked open yesterday, exposing its collection of solar atoms to contamination.

Flight engineers suspect a set of tiny explosives failed to trigger the capsule’s parachutes, and the capsule slammed into the Utah desert at 193 mph.

A recovery team that includes Genesis project members was dispatched to the crash site yesterday afternoon on a salvage mission. Scientists were hopeful they could salvage the broken disks that held billions of charged atoms collected from the solar wind.

“This is actually not the worst-case scenario,” said Andrew Dantzler, director of NASA’s solar system division, noting the capsule embedded itself in soft desert soil and avoided hitting anything that would have made it a “total loss.”

NASA planned to appoint a “mishap review board” within 72 hours that could take two to four months to determine a reason for the failure of the six year, $260 million mission.

The mishap raised questions about the durability of another NASA sample-return capsule called Stardust, due to land here in 2006. But that capsule was built to be more rugged and will land on its own with a parachute.

A helicopter was supposed to grab the Genesis capsule almost a mile above the Utah desert and lower it gently to the salt flats. But before the retrieval team learned of the parachute failure, the speeding capsule had slammed into the ground.