Don Brownlee Material Quotations

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

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.

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.

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

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.