Don Brownlee
Don Brownlee
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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We have successfully collected samples from the comet and we're bringing them home for analysis in laboratories all over the world.
Well, we'll see. But we do have some interesting stuff.
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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.