Don Brownlee Samples Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

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.