El Segundo, Calif. — A faulty radiator that caused a battery to overheat on NASA’s Genesis spacecraft will not affect its mission to gather solar particles, a spokesman at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Nov. 8.

Scientists managing the program became concerned with the issue in October, but after several weeks of investigation determined that the battery will last throughout the four-year mission despite the high temperatures, according to Frank O’Donnell, a spokesman for the lab.

"This won’t impact the sample collection or the length of the mission," O’Donnell said.

The $259 million Genesis spacecraft was launched Aug. 8 on a three-year mission, which will be the space agency’s first attempt at returning extraterrestrial samples from beyond the moon.

Genesis is scheduled to arrive Nov. 16 at its destination between the Earth and sun to gather solar matter. It will then swing by Earth in 2004 to drop a canister of the matter over the Utah desert by parachute. The canister will be recovered in midair.