Scientists hope the solar dust will yield clues about the origin of the solar system, two days after the disastrous landing demoralized mission officials.

"The science team is really excited about having these materials intact or mostly intact," said physicist Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory. "With these samples that were brought back from space we should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals."

Scientists have been peering inside the damaged capsule with flashlights and mirrors, finding intact parts. Some 350 palm-sized wafers make up five disks that were exposed to solar wind during the mission, collecting atoms from the sun.

"The key collector materials have been determined to be very intact," said Dan Sevilla, Genesis payload recovery lead engineer.

Sevilla said the main problem facing the recovery team is contamination.

"However, we have our collector and there is science to be gathered from this precious cargo," he said.

"We were rather demoralize by the events of the last Wednesday. ... Things are looking much better today than they felt on Wednesday," he said.

The probe crashed on re-entry in the Utah desert Wednesday after its parachutes failed to open, after a three-year mission covering 32 million kilometers (20 million miles).

The canister was taken to a cleanroom at the US Army Dugway Proving Ground in Utah near the crash site.

Ultimately the solar samples will be taken to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for study and preservation. No date has been set for the transfer, officials said Friday.

Genesis gathered 10 to 20 micrograms of bits of solar wind during its three-year mission, the first cosmic materials ever returned to Earth from beyond the Moon.

NASA's top objective is to measure "the oxygen isotope composition of the sun which will help us understand some of the details of how our solar system was formed," Wiens said. "These samples appeared to be intact."

"Overall we are really quiet confident we can still achieved a high degree of success from a science point of view," he added.

The capsule careered into the ground at 310 kilometers (193 miles) per hour, hurtling past helicopters that had planned to grab it in midair.

NASA television images showed the saucer-like capsule's dramatic tumble as it twirled rapidly toward the western state's desert.

The capsule struck the Earth so hard that half of it was lodged the in the ground, where it was stuck at a 10-degree angle.

It was sent to a spot in space where the gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth balance each other, giving Genesis an uninterrupted view of the sun away from Earth's magnetic field, which disrupts the solar winds.

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