Michael Zolensky Quotations

When we saw the huge impacts, we all started laughing and talking excitedly.

Much of the earth's water and organics perhaps came from comets. This can give us a history of organics in the solar system.

But we opened the tray, and everything went exactly right. It's fabulous.

We thought we might be able to see grains if they were large enough, but we really didn't know what would happen. They might just disintegrate and explode or pass all the way through.

There are so few of them and they are so tiny that we have little idea how to study them today.

You'll see a lot of information coming out quickly from these samples.

We had a long time to come up with all of the things that could go wrong.

We were really worried about that and got more and more worried as time went by. So when we opened the tray just two days ago in the lab, we were pleased to find that everything went exactly right -- just fabulous. We couldn't have done a better job catching these particles.

We thought maybe the collectors wouldn't open properly, or maybe they would be covered with gunk from the spacecraft.

We are trying to learn more about comets to see what the first materials were like or how water arrived on Earth. It's important because all the atoms in our bodies were formed from the stars.

We think much of the earth's water and organics . . . the molecules in our bodies, perhaps, came from comets.

It seems that comets are...a mixture of materials formed at all temperatures, at places very near the early sun and at places very remote from it.

It raises a question of why we still see zoning in the asteroid belt. It is a big mystery now. It's kind of really exciting.

That's a big surprise. People thought comets would just be cold stuff that formed out ... where things are very cold. It was kind of a shock to not just find one but several of these, which implies they are pretty common in the comet.

They are very small rocks, but they are rocks nonetheless. And what do these minerals tell us about how these grains form? We think that much of the Earth's water and organics ... perhaps came from comets. So what will these samples tell us about basically where our atoms and molecules came from and then how they were delivered to Earth and in what amount?

I was 8 years old. We studied wastewater disposal and planets.

By this week, more than 200 samples will be circulating. Everyone who wants one, and who is qualified to do the analysis, will have one.