NASA-JSC April First Thursday -- Genesis Solar Wind Sample Return – How and why to capture solar atoms

What was NASA's Genesis mission?  What did we learn from it?  This month's program features Judith Allton, who was involved with the Genesis Solar Wind Sample Return mission from the beginning. She served as the curator for the returned samples for over a decade.

Judy started her multi-decade career at JSC in 1974, working with the lunar samples from the Apollo missions. Her work involved opening and dissecting the Apollo soil drive core tubes. She developed significant expertise in handling lunar materials inside a nitrogen glovebox and the curation and archival of astromaterials samples.  Her Catalog of Apollo Lunar Surface Geological Sampling Tools and Containers (JSC-23454, March 1989) is considered a Gold standard to researchers, and has more recently been useful to Artemis planners.  

Judy contributed substantially to the planning, design, procurement, construction, and continual cleanliness monitoring of NASA's cleanest spacecraft assembly room to meet the 1998 readiness for flight for the Genesis payload cleaning.  Her analytical chemistry background, combined with more than four decades of astromaterial curation experience and interaction with the planetary geochemistry community was valuable throughout the planning and procedure development for Genesis -- from pre-flight, through recovery and post-flight curation phases.  She was present in Utah when the space capsule returned and crashed in 2004, as part of the team that recovered the solar collectors.  She served, until 2025, as curator of the solar wind collectors at Johnson Space Center, where samples are cleaned and shipped to scientists world-wide.

Ms. Allton's expertise continues to inform the current and future generations of astromaterial scientists, curators, and archivists.  In addition to over 40 publications, for which she is either the lead or a contributing author, she also was instrumental in providing educational materials which led to the production of the JSC-1 lunar soil simulant.  

Judy holds a BS in Chemistry and an MA in Geochemistry, both from UT-Austin.  However, she entered college as an art major.  She also is intensely interested in crafting and sharing stories which will inspire future generations of planetary explorers.