Don Brownlee Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.