ORBITING between the Earth and the Sun, the Genesis spacecraft has begun collecting particles of solar wind in its giant collector arrays, the US space agency NASA said Monday. ”We expect to start getting particle hits right away. Now we’ve gotten to the real focus of the mission: the start of science,” said Donald Burnett of California Institute of Technology, the Genesis project’s principal investigator. The 209-million-dollar mission was launched August 8. Since then the probe has travelled 1,5-million kilometres to an orbit around the point where the gravitational fields of the Earth and Sun are in balance. Scientists hope Genesis will collect up to 20 micrograms of the invisible charged particles expelled by the Sun before its scheduled return to Earth in 2004. – Sapa-AFP