What's this thing called solar wind?

Solar wind is a stream of particles emitted continually from the sun. Solar wind moves very fast at roughly 400 kilometers per second (about 1 million miles per hour). It will hit the Genesis spacecraft and push through the surface. Pieces of the sun will be trapped inside the Genesis spacecraft--not inside like in a can. Inside meaning inside the material of the spacecraft. The spacecraft is made of super clean stuff, so the scientists will know that anything that is more than what went out into space must be pieces of the sun. Shown below is an image (up-close) of what trapped material from the sun will look like when it is collected.

Is Genesis the first mission to study solar wind?

Many space missions have contributed to our current understanding of solar wind:

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a series of spacecraft with names such as IMP (Interplanetary Monitoring Platform), Pioneer, and ISEE (International Sun-Earth Explorer) that measured many of the properties of the solar wind.

The Apollo missions (11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17) to the moon in the 1970s used simple foil collection devices to trap solar wind particles for analysis back on Earth. Chemists studying these samples determined the abundances of a few elements in the solar wind at the surface of the moon.

The space station Skylab found the origin of the fast solar wind in 1973-1974.

The joint European-NASA spacecraft Ulysses orbited the sun from South to North in 1994-1995, confirming the existence of fast solar wind coming out of the sun's poles.

The Japanese spacecraft Yohkoh observes the sun's corona for information about the escape of solar wind particles.

The International Solar-Terrestrial Physics Initiative (ISTP) included several spacecraft and a multitude of detection instruments. Japans' Geotail (1992, carrying 2 US instruments), NASA's WIND (1994, carrying French and Russian detectors), ESA/NASA's SOHO (1995), Russia's Interball (1995), and NASA's Polar spacecraft (1996), were all part of the international effort to understand solar wind.

The IMAGE spacecraft showed global pictures of the Earth's magnetosphere responding to changes in the solar wind. The ACE spacecraft measures the intensity of solar wind. It provides about an hour's warning of extreme solar wind, "storms" that could overload power grids, disrupt satellite communications, and potentially harm astronauts.