Don Brownlee Quotations

We found mineral grains that are considered very high-temperature minerals -- they normally form under extremely high temperature conditions. And yet they were collected in a comet, the Siberia of the solar system.

We're just starting to work on this ... it will take years to analyze.

We've undergone a very heavy level of scrutiny by review boards because of Genesis and because of the Columbia accident. . . . It was a cultural shift in NASA, that you're now required to understand all the risks.

The real exciting thing will be opening the canister and seeing what the comet delivered to us.

The primary purpose of the Stardust mission was to collect comet dust, the most basic material of the solar system, and bring it back to Earth for study.

There are two major possibilities. One that they formed in the innermost, hotter-most regions of our solar system when the sun and planets were forming, and they were thrown out -- all the way out to the Pluto region of the solar system. The other possibility is they were formed around other stars, in hot regions around other stars.

Life is fairly easy to create, but I think planets like Earth are going to be rare.

Much of the science of this mission hasn't been done yet.

One major concern was having it break open.

But the study of these materials will go on for decades.

We traveled almost 3 billion miles in space. We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and it landed here this morning. It's an incredible thrill.

What we want to know is how organic molecules actually form in comets and whether they helped deliver organic material to the Earth before life began.

People all over world will be able to analyze them down to a single atomic scale.

Our history is written at the submicron level, in these interstellar grains.

Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice. We have found samples in the coldest part of the solar system.

Our mission is called Stardust, in part because we believe some of the particles in the comet will, in fact, be older than the sun.

It felt like the whole thing was on the verge of disaster. There was this guy with his finger on a button to blow the vehicle up if it went off range. ... No one said anything for minutes.

We'll be able to say some things almost instantly. One of the big questions is do comets contain minerals that contain water, called hydrated silicates and under an electron microscope you can identify those practically instantly.

We have successfully collected samples from the comet and we're bringing them home for analysis in laboratories all over the world.

Well, we'll see. But we do have some interesting stuff.

We were stunned when we got to the comet and saw incredible features - steep cliffs, overhanging cliffs, spires and many features which, oddly enough, we had never been seen on other Solar System bodies.

We were jumping up and down ? we were totally overwhelmed by the ability to see this so quickly and so straightforwardly. We were the first people in the history of the planet to see comet dust in hand.

We didn't really know until now if we had captured them. For all we knew, they could have just exploded on impact.

We did this mission to collect the most primitive materials we could in the solar system. We went to a comet that formed at the edge of the solar system, far from the sun under very cold conditions. We're confident that it was made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system.

We're collecting things that are very ancient and even older than our solar system. We are literally reaching for the stars.

We are nearing the end of quite a fantastic voyage.

We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and landed here this morning. It was a real thrill.

We are collecting the actual building blocks the solar system was formed from 4.5 billion years ago. We believe that the particles have a lot of information stored in them.

We saw incredible features -- steep cliffs, overhanging cliffs, spires and many other things we had never seen on other solar system bodies.

We believe materials coming out of comets now is the same material that went into comets 4.5 billion years ago.

We have a crew onboard of over a million people -- their names are etched in a little silicon chip. As an astrobiology-type person, I'm intrigued by the thought that those names and that spacecraft will far outlive the Earth. When the Sun becomes a red giant and scorches the Earth, that spacecraft and those names will still be floating around the galaxy somewhere.

We found the hottest samples in the coldest place. These are mineral grains that normally form under high temperature conditions. They were either red hot or white hot grains. Yet they were collected in the Siberia of the solar system.

We weren't quite sure how bright it was going to be and some people didn't think we would see anything.

We are approaching the end of a quite fantastic voyage.

Every grain that we collected has a story to tell.

Each year we have 30 to 40,000 tons of primitive material from comets and asteroids that lands on Earth, and this is about one particle per square meter per day. So during the course of our seven-year mission, there was more comet dust collected in your backyard than what we're bringing home.

Five minutes before it was supposed to come in, we ran outside. I saw this red thing that, at first, I thought was Mars. Then I noticed it was moving, from our angle it appeared to be climbing. Pretty soon, it had this glowing, reddish tail that lasted maybe half a minute. ... We were all yelling and jumping up and down.

Some scientific secrets will come out almost immediately.

You're seeing the very first, absolutely identified comet particle that has ever been seen.

This is a really exciting mystery story, so stay tuned.

This is probably one of the easier parts of the entire mission.

This comet formed at very edge of the solar system ... out by pluto ... and spent all its lifetime out there until recently it came into the inner part of the solar system, where we could sample it.

This is when the real science begins. And I wouldn't be surprised if what we find includes some surprises.

This is what we looked like 4.5 billion years ago. Comets haven't changed since then.

This is very exciting. It's a mystery story.

About 10 per cent of this comet is made of organic materials. We don't know exactly what they all are but it is very exciting.

It's a crystalline silicate grain. This is great; we've already got scientific results.

It's a very exciting mystery story. So stay tuned.

It's hard to describe what it feels like to finally be here.

The biggest impacts were big enough to put your little finger in.

It's hard to convey to people how tense these situations can be.

In recent decades, spacecraft have passed fairly close to comets and provided us with excellent data. Stardust, however, marks the first time that we have ever collected samples from a comet and brought them back to Earth for study.

You can't see them with the unaided eye (but) with the aided eye (through a microscope) you can see everything. A little particle blown up to high magnification is like working on an entire state! It's amazing.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system. Personally, I feel a strong attachment to this thing and we should all feel a strong attachment to it because the fact is all the atoms in our bodies -- the carbon atoms and the oxygen, nitrogen, potassium and calcium and so forth -- all those atoms were in stardust rings ... before the solar system formed.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system. All of the atoms in our bodies - the carbon atoms, the oxygen, the nitrogen, potassium, calcium and so forth - all of those atoms were in stardust grains like those coming out of the comet now before the solar system formed.

These are literally the building blocks of our planetary system.

This is a history project. We are going to the edge of the solar system, collecting the original building blocks of the planets and bringing them back to our labs.

The imaging was a bonus, but boy, what a bonus.

The fundamental reason for this mission is that we are collecting what we believe are the best preserved samples of the formation of our solar system and they are preserved because they formed these comet bodies beyond the major planets out beyond Neptune.

The capsule's return is probably the simplest of all the things Stardust has done and has the least risk. Nonetheless, it has to work.

All the engineers who built it seemed to be happy. It's very strong.