Donald Brownlee System Quotations

We're approaching the end of a fantastic voyage. This is the farthest anything from Earth has traveled and come back. Soon we'll be able to examine the building blocks that formed the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

Last Sunday, after seven years in space traveling nearly three billion miles, Stardust landed in the Great Salt Lake Desert with a treasure from when the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago. We should have more than one million particles larger than one micron in diameter.

Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice. We've found samples from the coldest part of the solar system that have mineral grains formed under extremely high temperatures.

Virtually all of the atoms in our bodies and in the Earth were in interstellar grains - stardust grains - before the solar system formed. We're using this comet as a library that picked up records of the formation of our solar system, and has been storing them far from the sun at very low temperatures for four and a half billion years.

Its cargo was an ancient, cosmic treasure from the very edge of the solar system ? a treasure that formed when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

I fully expect that textbooks in the future will have a lot of information about the formation of the solar system from these samples that landed this morning in Utah.

Inside this thing is our treasure, our sample of the edge of the solar system that truly contains star dust.