On November 16th the Genesis spacecraft reached its destination — Earth's L₁ Lagrangian point, 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) away — and has begun to collect material from the solar wind. From its new home, Genesis will cast a "net" of ultrapure silicon and sapphire wafers in the hopes to capture and return to Earth between 10 to 20 micrograms of coronal material.

However, the mission may be in jeopardy due to a malfunctioning thermal radiator on the sample-return capsule. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe that a contaminant in the radiator's white paint has degraded after constant exposure to ultraviolet sunlight and, as a result, ruined the radiator's ability to dissipate heat. Consequently, the battery needed to operate the return capsule in the critical final hour of the mission is overheating well beyond its design limit. The beleaguered battery should survive this ordeal, but no one will know for sure until the parachute deploys during Genesis' 10½-km-per-second reentry above the Utah desert in September 2004. Meanwhile, the capsule's lid, having opened to allow the collector panels to deploy, is currently being kept almost closed to shade the battery as best as possible.