Don Brownlee
Don Brownlee
analysis bringing collected comet home samples
We have successfully collected samples from the comet and we're bringing them home for analysis in laboratories all over the world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
starting work
We're just starting to work on this ... it will take years to analyze.
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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.
comet delivered exciting opening seeing
The real exciting thing will be opening the canister and seeing what the comet delivered to us.
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Remarkably enough, we have found fire and ice. We have found samples in the coldest part of the solar system.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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People all over world will be able to analyze them down to a single atomic scale.
history written
Our history is written at the submicron level, in these interstellar grains.
Well, we'll see. But we do have some interesting stuff.